Not So Random Quotes & Sayings

It was so stupid, and random, but at that second, with the morning sun hitting her auburn hair, and her huge brown eyes fixed on him, the lock flew off the "do-not-allow-yourself-to-even-think-about-it" portion of his brain, and every feeling he ever had for her - feelings he never even realized he had for her - flooded over him like a tidal wave. Love, tenderness, desire - it hit him so hard he had to excuse himself, go to the men's room, rest his forehead against the cool metal of the bathroom stall, breathing heavily, wondering what the hell had just happened. It left him exhausted and spent, as if he'd just run a hundred miles.
And almost a year later, he was still exhausted, spent, frustrated ... and madly in love. — Claire Matthews

He was in that familiar state - not that the occasion mattered to seriously to him
of incoherent ideas spreading outward without a center, so characteristic of the present, and whose strange arithmetic adds up to a random proliferation of numbers without forming a unit. — Robert Musil

Luck is not as random as you think.
Before that lottery ticket won the jackpot, someone had to buy it. — Vera Nazarian

Make excellent mistakes.
Too many people spend their time avoiding mistakes. They're so concerned about being wrong, about messing up, that they never try anything
which means they never do anything. Their focus is avoiding failure. But that's actually a crummy way to achieve success. The most successful people spectacular mistakes
huge, honking screwups! why? They're trying to do something big, but each time they make a mistake, they get a little better and move a little closer to excellence.
Making mistakes seems risky. It is/ But it's more risky not to.
I'm not talking about random, stupid, thoughtless blunders, though. I'm talking about good mistakes.
Mistakes come from having high aspirations, from trying to do something nobody else has done. — Daniel H. Pink

The days I'm not doing videos, I always have random stuff. We do production meeting stuff. Those are so stupid. Everyone's like, 'We like you; we don't know what to do with you.' I'm like, 'Cool.' — Jenna Marbles

Despite having known him for almost a year, there were a lot of things I still didn't know about Zachary Goode. Like how soap and shampoo could smell so much better on him than anyone else. Like where he went when he wasn't mysteriously showing up at random (and frequently dangerous) points in my life. And, most of all, I didn't know how, when he mentioned the jacket, he made me think about the sweet, romantic part of the night last November when he'd given it to me, and not the terrible, bloody, international-terrorists-are-trying-to-kidnap-me part that came right after — Ally Carter

Living organisms were not independently created, but have descended and diversified over time from common ancestors. And thus, no other biological theory so elegantly explains this. Evolutionary theory has withstood the test of time - by way of vicarious experimentation, observation, analysis, and relentless criticism, though opposing viewpoints still cling to the concept of "design." As a person of the biological sciences, I cannot subscribe to such misguided notions that suggest static biological states. Clearly, proper examination of the natural world reveal evolutionary trajectories - some random, others nonrandom - and all having observable genetic implications. It is only when we apply evolutionary explanations to living systems that it becomes ever so clear. The world was not specifically designed with us in mind, but rather we long since adapted and conformed to our surroundings, only giving it the illusionary appearance of "design. — Tommy Rodriguez

The first attempts to consider the behavior of so-called "random neural nets" in a systematic way have led to a series of problems concerned with relations between the "structure" and the "function" of such nets. The "structure" of a random net is not a clearly defined topological manifold such as could be used to describe a circuit with explicitly given connections. In a random neural net, one does not speak of "this" neuron synapsing on "that" one, but rather in terms of tendencies and probabilities associated with points or regions in the net. — Anatol Rapoport

For shit's sake, it wasn't like there was a twelve-step for being the Scribe Virgin's kid:
Hi, I'm Vishous. I'm her son and I've been her son for three hundred years.
HI, VISHOUS.
She's done a head job on me again, and I'm trying not to go to the Other Side and scream bloody murder at her.
WE UNDERSTAND, VISHOUS.
And on the bloody note, I'd like to dig up my father and kill him all over again, but I can't. So I'm just going to try to keep my sister alive even though she's paralyzed, and attempt to fight the urge to find some pain so I can deal with this Payne.
YOU'RE A STRAIGHT-UP PUSSY, VISHOUS, BUT WE SUPPORT YOUR SORRY ASS. — J.R. Ward

Since he didn't seem to understand the situation, I felt it my duty to enlighten him. "Wrong. You started this stupid rumor and half the school probably believes it's true. Now you have to stick around and pretend to be my boyfriend to convince everyone I don't have sex with random guys. Not to mention the fact that if you'd kept your mouth shut about getting laid, you wouldn't be in this situation."
He raised a brow. "So you're my punishment? — Chris Cannon

. . . my underlying, not-so-hidden agenda is to help enhance and enrich the encounter of the museum-goer with enduring objects, in a time when we all seem to be assailed by random noise and flickering images. — Esther Green Bierbaum

Stuff Happens.' That's the G-rated version. That's a bumper sticker that
only a straight white upper middle class male could have made. Because anyone who
isn't straight, anyone who isn't male, anyone who isn't white, anyone who isn't upper middle class knows that stuff doesn't just happen. Stuff gets done by people to people. Nothing is a coincidence. Nothing is random. This isn't osmosis. And so we act as if it's this passive thing, but yet that's not the case. — Tim Wise

Humph. Looking around for the sword, are you? Well, it's a better idea than thrashing around at random.'
'The Prince,' said Master Horace repressively, 'will inform us of his intentions when he wishes to do so. We are here to serve, not to quest
'
'Yes, it's the sword,' Edoran told her. — Hilari Bell

He could not consent to allow himself to be insulted, still less to allow himself to be treated as a rag, and, above all, to allow a thoroughly vicious man to treat him so. No quarrelling, however, no quarrelling! Possibly if some one wanted, if some one, for instance, actually insisted on turning Mr. Golyadkin into a rag, he might have done so, might have done so without opposition or punishment (Mr. Golyadkin was himself conscious of this at times), and he would have been a rag and not Golyadkin - yes, a nasty, filthy rag; but that rag would not have been a simple rag, it would have been a rag possessed of dignity, it would have been a rag possessed of feelings and sentiments, even though dignity was defenceless and feelings could not assert themselves, and lay hidden deep down in the filthy folds of the rag, still the feelings there ... — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Whether or not he came to believe it - so many people, when they have a mission, come to believe something in a way that may have started out as a slogan. You know, L. Ron Hubbard, not to make a random comparison, started Scientology as a scam. — Alex Gibney

Yeah, I worry what will happen when we stop running. When we go back to school. When she meets other boys. Boys who don't argue and snap at her. Boys who don't obsessively worry about her. Boys that could take her to a movie and stay right until the end, not have to leave halfway through because he started turning into a wolf. But she wouldn't pick up some random guy in the mall. Ever.
So why was I over-reacting? I don't know. I saw the guy and something ignited in my brain, a flash-fire that burned away reason and common sense. If Simon hadn't stopped me, I'd have made an idiot of myself and called attention to us. Worse, I'd have embarrassed Chloe. I was over-protective enough as it was. Frothing at the mouth because a guy talked to her? Really not going help us get to that next anniversary. — Kelley Armstrong

The sceptical attack [on free will philosophy's concept of libertarian freedom] amounts simply to a dogmatic determination to describe the world only in terms that already exclude freedom as a distinctive feature of human life. The sceptic assumes that the world can contain no power other than causation; and that any event that is not causally determined by prior events must just be random. But if we insist on describing the world only in these terms, then of course it may well appear that libertarian freedom is not possible and cannot exist. But by what right do we so exclude such freedom from the very outset? — Thomas Pink

The purpose of random testing is not to catch, punish, or expose students who use drugs, but to save their lives and discover abuse problems early so that students can grow up and learn in a drug-free environment. — John Walters

But I'm different now than I was then. Just like I was different at the end of the trip than I'd been in the beginning. And I'll be different tomorrow than i am today. And what that means is that i can never replicate that trip. Even if I went to the same places and met the same people, it would'nt be the same. My experience would'nt be the same. To me, that's what traveling should be about. Meeting people, learning to not only appreciate a different culture, but really enjoy it like a local, following whatever impulse strikes you. So how could I recommend a trip to someone else, if I don't even know what to expect? My advice would be to make a list of places on some index cards, shuffle them, and pick any fice at random. Then just ... go and see what happens. If you have the right mind-set, it does'nt matter where you end up or how much money you brought. It'll be something you'll remember forever. — Nicholas Sparks

Woah, their gorgeous not so fast I haven't even catched your name or your number - Jaxson Evans — Brit Gosik

Doesn't it blow your mind that God thought of you? You were not a random birth. You were created in the mind of God. He named you and then wrote your name on the palm of His hands. He has counted every hair on your head and collected every tear you have cried ~ that is how precious you are to Him. Remember, this is a soul dance and our partner, our Father, is waltzing us back home. When we stumble ~ we learn how to get up. When we fall off the cliff ~ we learn how to fly. Remember if you're afraid of stumbling you will never get to fall, you will never fly, and oh I tell you, you don't want to miss that adventure, by the way, they are all adventures. So, stumble my child, skin your knees and elbows, let go, let God and when you come to the edge of that cliff....Fall.... — Aleece Walz

The universe was not kind to auggie pullman. what did the little kid ever do to deserve his sentence? what did the parents do? or olivia? she once mentioned that some doctor told her parents that he odds of someone getting the same combination of syndromes that came together to make auggie's face was like one in four million. so doesn't that make the universe a giant lottery, then? you purchase a ticket when you're born. it's all just random whether you get a good ticket or a bad ticket. it's all just luck. — R.J. Palacio

Further, the random element in trial and error is not quite random, if it is carried out rationally, using error as a source of information. If every trial provides you with information about what does not work, you start zooming in on a solution - so every attempt becomes more valuable, more like an expense than an error. And of course you make discoveries along the way. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

This will happen again," Nathaniel explained. "Even if we manage not to hurt each other, eventually one of us will get sick or get bored, or someone else will get in the way. Maybe they won't mean to. Maybe my mom will need me when she's older and I'll have to go to her - "
"I'd go with you," Kelly offered.
" - or maybe one of us will die young or maybe you'll fall out of love with me because emotions can't be controlled. Or maybe we'll get to a point where we want to hurt each other. I know that's hard to imagine now, but relationships only get more complicated as time goes by."
"So we better avoid them?" Kelly snapped. "Why do you even leave the house? Why aren't you constantly scared of getting hit by a car or shot by some random lunatic?"
Nathaniel exhaled." I never was before. Not until I fell in love with you. — Jay Bell

Yes, the fans are going to get their money's worth. It's like ... and everything on there is funny. It's not like random crap they put in a movie. I think it's all very funny, so. — Nicholas Stoller

Love and lust aren't always in sync. You can love someone, but not be
ready to have sex with them. Or you can meet someone random and end up jumping in all the way. There's nothing wrong with either. You've waited this long, so wait until you're really feeling
it. If he's The One, he'll understand. — Dorota Skrzypek

My job as an author - at least the way I think of it - is to make a story that is coded and puzzling enough to entice conversation and interpretation, but also to do the opposite: to make some things clear so that it is meaningful in some way, not just a random assemblage of ideas. — Shane Carruth

Thus, little by little, I became conscious where I was; and to have a wish to express my wishes to those who could content them, and I could not; for the wishes were within me, and they without; nor could they by any sense of theirs enter within my spirit. So I flung about at random limbs and voice, making the few signs I could, and such as I could, like, though in truth very little like, what I wished. — Augustine Of Hippo

Being a scientist means that you should be able to put your faith to the test, and be willing to surrender it should evidence so require. But it does not mean we have no beliefs. In fact, the very discipline of science is based on the belief that the world is comprehensible, and even more audaciously, that it is mathematically describable. The thing about scientific beliefs is that they are not arbitrary. They're not just random opinions we plucked out of the sky; we came to them through observation and experience, and so far, these beliefs have always been vindicated. — Tasneem Zehra Husain

C being what it is lacks support for multiple return values, so the notion that it is meaningful to pass pointers to memory objects into which any random function may write random values without having a clue where they point, has not been debunked as the sheer idiocy it really is. — Erik Naggum

I took to writing as my medicine to help me stay afloat in acting career journey. I wrote about me breaking hearts, and my heart being broken. I wrote about my views whether they were liberal or conservative. I wrote about everything. I wrote about my life. When I did not have paper coming in as green backs, I'd use random pieces of paper for stories. It was like, I got no money, but I have paper to write. So I wrote. — Omari Hardwick

Every single world we've visited isn't just random - it's the result of countless choices, all of them combining to create a new reality. You and I have been given an infinity of chances, and that's so much more than mot people will ever get - but in the end we get to live in only one world, and that's the world we make. I want us to create that world together. — Claudia Gray

In World War One it was the propaganda of our side that first made "propaganda" so opprobrious a term. Fouled by close association with "the Hun," the word did not regain its innocence - not even when the Allied propaganda used to tar "the Hun" had been belatedly exposed to the American and British people. Indeed, as they learned more and more about the outright lies, exaggerations and half-truths used on them by their own governments, both populations came, understandably, to see "propaganda" as a weapon even more perfidious than they had thought when they had not perceived themselves as its real target. Thus did the word's demonic implications only harden through the Twenties, in spite of certain random efforts to redeem it. — Edward L. Bernays

Simply put, I love books, physical books. I own so many--many of which I have not read (yet). I just need to have them . On shelves. In piles. In random conference tote bags. Paper magazines and newspapers too. Some call it clutter. I call it cozy. It's comforting to know I am surrounded by pages of stories. And, thus, by storytellers. — Donna Talarico

Like any collection of family photographs, it was a random selection that told only fragments of a story. The real tale would be revealed by the pictures that were missing or never even taken at all, not the ones that had been so carefully framed or packed away neatly in an envelope. — Victoria Hislop

Countries like Jamaica do not have a random program, so they can go months without being tested. I'm not saying anyone is on anything, but everyone needs to be on a level playing field. — Carl Lewis

Perhaps there really is a good that exists; for a century of darkness to be eschewed by a single flame; for a decade of evil done to the heart to be undone by simple and unplanned acts of kindness! There must be a goodness, after all! But we don't find it when we're looking for it; not in church, not in a cathedral, not even in our own homes! We find it when we've fallen down so hard, are downtrodden so low; and there is one true friend who picks us up; or one random person who takes us in! And we realize goodness was never in the places we thought it was! It was all along in the most humble of places: bound up in the heart of a true friend. — C. JoyBell C.

I don't need to praise anything so justly famous as Frost 's observation of and empathy with everything in Nature from a hornet to a hillside; and he has observed his own nature, one person's random or consequential chains of thoughts and feelings and perceptions, quite as well. (And this person, in the poems, is not the "alienated artist" cut off from everybody who isn't, yum-yum, another alienated artist; he is someone like normal people only more so a normal person in the less common and more important sense of normal . — Randall Jarrell

Maybe you've never fallen into a frozen stream. Here's what happens.
1. It is cold. So cold that the Department of Temperature Acknowledgment and Regulation in you brain gets the readings and says, "I can't deal with this. I'm out of here." It puts up the OUT TO LUNCH sign and passes all responsibility to the ...
2. Department of Pain and the Processing Thereof, which gets all this gobbledygook from the temperature department that it can't understand. "This is so not our job," it says. So it just starts hitting random buttons, filling you with strange and unpleasant sensations, and calls the ...
3. Office of Confusion and Panic, where there is always someone ready to hop on the phone the moment it rings. This office is at least willing to take some action. The Office of Confusion and Panic loves hitting buttons. — Maureen Johnson

Love is so much more than some random, euphoric feeling. And real love isn't always fluffy, cute, and cuddly. More often than not, real love has its sleeves rolled up, dirt and grime smeared on its arms, and sweat dripping down its forehead. Real love asks us to do hard things - to forgive one another, to support each other's dreams, to comfort in times of grief, or to care for family. Real love isn't easy - and it's nothing like the wedding day - but it's far more meaningful and wonderful. — Seth Adam Smith

I get the feeling humanity would be thrilled to discover life on another planet. So why not rediscover it here and really cherish it. — Tom Althouse

Stoicism, seen this way, becomes pure robustness - for the attainment of a state of immunity from one's external circumstances, good or bad, and an absence of fragility to decisions made by fate, is robustness. Random events won't affect us either way (we are too strong to lose, and not greedy to enjoy the upside), so we stay in the middle column of the Triad. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Cultural evolution can proceed so quickly because it operates, as biological evolution does not, in the "Lamarckian" mode - by the inheritance of acquired characters. Whatever one generation learns, it can pass to the next by writing, instruction, inculcation, ritual, tradition, and a host of methods that humans have developed to assure continuity in culture. Darwinian evolution, on the other hand, is an indirect process: genetic variation must first be available to construct an advantageous feature, and natural selection must then preserve it. Since genetic variation arises at random, not preferentially directed toward advantageous features, the Darwinian process works slowly. Cultural evolution is not only rapid; it is also readily reversible because its products are not coded in our genes. — Stephan Jay Gould

Are you always this random? (Jericho)
Mostly. It really irritates Noir. Which is just an added bonus for me. At least so long as I can outrun him. (Asmodeus)
Add me to that list of people you annoy. (Jericho)
Oh. You're not going to singe my testicles over it, are you?! (Asmodeus)
No plans to. (Jericho)
Good. We can be friends, then. (Asmodeus) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

I get the biggest enjoyment from the random and unexpected places. Linux on cellphones or refrigerators, just because it's so not what I envisioned it. Or on supercomputers. — Linus Torvalds

How can anyone say there is no God?" Hugh asks as he places his hands on his hip and stares at the beautiful night sky. "Just look at the heavens so full of wonder and awe. This is not the result of some random explosion. Oh no! This," he proclaims, opening his arms wide, "was thoughtfully designed by a brilliant creator with absolute precision and order. — Tracy Del Campo

So doesn't that make the universe a giant lottery, then? you purchase a ticket when you're born. and it's all just random whether you get a good ticket or a bad ticket. it's all just luck. my head swirls on this, but then softer thoughts soothe, like a flatted third on a major chord. no, no, it's not all random, if it really was all random, the universe would abandon us completely. and the universe doesn't. it takes care of its most fragile creations in ways we can't see. like with the parents who adore you blindly. and the big sister who feels guilty for being human over you. and a little gravelly-voiced kid whose friends have left him over you. and even a pink-haired girl who carries your picture in her wallet. maybe it is a lottery, but the universe makes it all even out in the end. the universe takes care of all of its birds. — R.J. Palacio

You could consider the idea of the multiverse, and think of it as something like a tree - that is, the universe we live in is one of an uncountable number of branches of possible universes, created by random chance and the decisions of sentient beings. So, for instance, when I rang you up in the morning, there was a possible future universe in which you answered the phone, and another in which you did not, and by answering the phone you put us in one universe and not the other. In that instance the time traveler doesn't just move from the future to the past and back to the future: he moves down one branch of the universe, toward the root that's back at the beginning of time, and back up another branch. — Dexter Palmer

His action of joining them, which would have been rude in a restaurant that was not moving at three hundred kilometers an hour, was perfectly acceptable on a train, which mimicked the entirely random joinings of life but revealed their true nature by making them last only hours or days, rather than years and decades. People on a train form an alliance, as if the world that surrounded the parallel rails were hostile and and they refugees from it. The dining car, humming and rocking gently in the night, annihilated past and future and made all associations outside of itself seem vaguely unreal. So they welcomed him at their table, for he was one of them, a traveler, not one of those wraiths through whose night-lit cities they passed. — Alexander Jablokov

I usually have Kafka biography in my bathroom. It's a book I can open at random and feel interested in immediately. It's really funny. With this book, since I'm opening it at random and immediately interested, I don't feel the need to read more than I want to read, in that there's not, like, a plot that leads me along. So I can stop whenever. — Tao Lin

It has always irked me as improper that there are still so many people for whom the sky is no more than a mass of random points of light. I do not see why we should recognize a house, a tree, or a flower here below and not, for example, the red Arcturus up there in the heavens as it hangs from its constellation Bootes, like a basket hanging from a balloon. — M.C. Escher

Darling Daddy,
This is Rose.
Very good news. Caddy is going to marry Micheal. In case you have forgotten because you have not been home for so long he is the one with the ponytail and the earring that you do not like. And Caddy says she will have a white lace dress and three bridesmaids, Saffron and Sarah and me, and a big party for everyone, all her old boyfriends too. Fireworks. A band. A big tent called a marquee. But where will we put it? Carriages with white horses for us all to go to the church. Afterward Caddy and Micheal will go for a holiday to Australia to visit the Great Barrier Reef. Caddy has it all worked out and Mummy says Yes She Can Of Course You Can Darling Of Course You Must Do That. Saffron said That Will Cost a Few Weeks Housekeeping and Mummy said Yes But We Do Not Need to Worry About That. DADDY WILL PAY.
Love, Rose. — Hilary McKay

Susan said. "You ought to not forget that whoever you killed last year, there were people you could have killed and didn't."
"There's that," I said.
"We all do what we need to, and what we have to, not what we ought to, or ought to have. You're a violent man. You wouldn't do your work if you weren't. What makes you so attractive, among other things, is that your capacity for violence is never random, it is rarely self-indulgent, and you don't take it lightly. You make mistakes. But they are mistakes of judgment. They are not mistakes of the heart. — Robert B. Parker

Human rights violations are nit accidents; they are not random in distribution or effect. Rights violations are, rather, symptoms of deeper pathologies of power and are linked intimately to the social conditions that so often determine who will suffer abuse and who will be shielded from harm. — Paul Farmer

Oh no! Akri-Nicky! You okay? The Simi didn't know it was her favorite blue-eyed demon boy when she hit him so hard so as to protect his precious akra-mama. Oh no! You still living and breathing and not broken? 'Cause if you not, can the Simi eat your dead, meaty remains? Please, please, please? Maybe some of them bones, too, 'cause the marrow can be quite tasty in its own right. Simi. — Sherrilyn Kenyon

Modern science hasn't managed to come up with answers to any of the most basic questions. How did life first appear on earth? How does evolution work? Is it a series of random events, or does it have a set teleological direction? There are all kinds of theories, but we haven't been able to prove one of them. The structure of the atom is not a miniature of the solar system, it's something much more difficult to grasp, full of what you might call latent power. And when we try to observe the subatomic world, we find that the mind of the observer comes into play in subtle ways. The mind, my friend! The very same mind which, ever since Descartes, proponents of the mechanistic view of the universe considered subordinate to the body-machine. And now we find that the mind influences observed results. So I give up. Nothing surprises me. I'm prepared to accept anything that happens in this world. I actually kind of envy people who can still believe in the omnipotence of modern science. — Koji Suzuki

The thing that's hard about it - the thing that makes it so hard when the person you love has been taken from you, not by something evil you could have seen coming but by random, pure chance - is that you find yourself suddenly living through a history other than the one you expected to live, through no fault of your own. I feel . . . it's hard to describe, but I feel weirdly outside of time. Ever since the accident I've had these moments when I felt like a visiting guest in this world, not a permanent resident. Like sometimes I look in a mirror and I feel like I can almost see through the version of me on the other side of the glass. And sometimes I feel like I can see the history I used to be in more clearly than the history I'm in now - the real history is one where Philip and Sean and I are all together, being a family and doing whatever family things people do, and this one's like . . . like a fake version of events that I've been yanked into, where everything's gone wrong. — Dexter Palmer

Live in the space between chaos and shape. I walk the line that continually threatens to lose its tautness under me, dropping me into the dark pit where there is no meaning. At other times the line is so wired that it lights up the soles of my feet, gradually my whole body, until I am my own beacon, and I see then the beauty of newly created worlds, a form that is not random. A new beginning. — Jeanette Winterson

Just as little as a reader today reads all of the individual words (let alone syllables) on a page - rather he picks about five words at random out of twenty and "guesses" at the meaning that probably belongs to these five words - just as little do we see a tree exactly and completely with reference to leaves, twigs, color, and form; it is so very much easier for us to simply improvise some approximation of a tree. Even in the midst of the strangest experiences we will still do the same: we make up the major part of the experience and can scarcely be forced not to contemplate some event as its "inventors." All this means: basically and from time immemorial we are - accustomed to lying. Or to put it more virtuously and hypocritically, in short, more pleasantly: one is much more of an artist than one knows. — Friedrich Nietzsche

What are you up to?"
"Oh, you know, mischief and mayhem," he replied.
"That so reminds me of Harry Potter," Brit said, sighing. "I need a re-read."
We all turned to her. Two bright spots appeared in her cheeks as she tossed her blonde hair back. "What? I'm not ashamed to admit that random things remind me of Harry Potter. — J. Lynn

It was a Friday morning, and Walmart was populated only by the occasional mom with very young children and the random senior citizen, which made my bathroom makeover less conspicuous. Only one woman came in while I stood in front of the mirror, and she went straight to the toilets. I made sure that when she came out I was no longer standing in front of the mirror but was huddled with my palms stretched out beneath a loud hand dryer, my face completely averted. No one expects to see a celebrity in their local Walmart bathroom. Most of us don't really look at each other anyway. Our eyes glance off without really registering what we're seeing. It's human nature. It's polite society. Ignore each other unless someone is grotesquely fat or immodestly dressed or disfigured in some way - and then we pretend not to see, but we see everything. I was none of those things, and so far human nature was working in my favor. — Amy Harmon

Western man has tried for too many centuries to fool himself that he lives in a rational world. No. There's a story about a man who, while walking along the street, was almost hit on the head and killed by an enormous falling beam. This was his moment of realization that he did not live in a rational world but a world in which men's lives can be cut off by a random blow on the head, and the discovery shook him so deeply that he was impelled to leave his wife and children, who were the major part of his old, rational world. My own response to the wild unpredictability of the universe has been to write stories, to play the piano, to read, listen to music, look at paintings - not that the world may become explainable and reasonable but that I may rejoice in the freedom which unaccountability gives us. — Madeleine L'Engle

Listen,' Thomas said, slowly getting to his feet, hoping Minho wouldn't be stupid enough to try anything. "There's something about us. We're not just random shanks who showed up on your doorstep. We're valuable. Alive, not dead."
The anger on Jorge's face lessened ever so slightly. Maybe a spark of curiosity. But what he said was 'What's a shank? — James Dashner

I learn so much that I previously did not know about the world of the immobile that it is hard to believe it all takes place over a few hours. At random: I learn about the casual indifference of the London cabbie to the wheelchair user and that the clearance on accessible entrances is measured in millimetres less than a knuckle. I learn how intractable it is to push a grown man around for hours and how spontaneity is the privilege of the able-bodied. In solid counterpart to all this grief, I learn about the lengths nurses are prepared to go to assist a purely recreational and ambitious project by one of their patients. — Marion Coutts

That life - whatever else it is - is short. That fate is cruel but maybe not random. That Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn't mean we have to bow and grovel to it. That maybe even if we're not always so glad to be here, it's our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open. And in the midst of our dying, as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn't touch. — Donna Tartt

The Lion King? It's just a kid's film.

Just a kid's film?!? Yeah, just a kid's film with an IMDB rating of 8.5, 2 Academy Awards and 2 Golden Globes, that's been adapted into THE most successful West-end musical of all time, generating a gross profit of 8 million pounds and counting. "But maybe it's just a kid's film because it doesn't deal with any mature films" said fucking nobody ever. The Lion King is the greatest anthropomorphic assault upon the theme of mortality that Western culture has ever produced. It is so complex that your tiny, shriveled, and scrotum of a brain wouldn't dare to fathom it. So no, it is not just a kid's film, it is Shakespear with fur! — Jack Whitehall

Taking pains, working hard, not flaunting his or her chops so much as relying on them, the pop artisan teeters on a fine fulcrum between the stern, sell-the-product morality of the workhorse and the artist's urge to discover a pattern in, or derive a meaning from, the random facts of the world. — Michael Chabon

Cordyceps." "That's a fungus? Never heard of it." "Says here it does something to an ant's brain, reprograms it like it's a machine, makes it climb to the top of a plant before it dies - " "An invisible machine that reprograms brains? I'm fairly certain that's not a random entry." "Yeah? So what does it mean, then?" "It means ... It means we aren't free. None of us are. — Hugh Howey

Under the dolls were books, a dozen or so, that her mother must have grabbed at random; she wouldn't have known which were Eleanor's favorites. Eleanor was glad to see Garp and Watership Down. It sucked that Oliver's Story had made the cut, but Love Story hadn't. And Little Men was there, but not Little Women or Jo's Boys. — Rainbow Rowell

...you think cabling is unnatural--that's what your arguments all come down to. But it's not. Not between people that really fit. Maya, do you have any idea how unlikely it is that two structures as complex as minds could be joined like that? It's like picking up two stones at random and discovering that they fit together perfectly. It isn't a coincidence, it can't be. They fit together so easily--like reuniting something that should never have been broken, filling in some ancient wound... — Raphael Carter

Although I insist that God has always had the power to intervene directly in nature to create new forms, I am willing to be per-suaded that He chose not to do so and instead employed secondary natural causes like random mutation and natural selection. — Phillip E. Johnson

Will the time ever come when I am not so completely dependent on thoughts I first had in childhood to furnish the feedstock for my comparisons and analogies and sense of the parallel rhythms of microhistory? Will I reach a point where there will be a good chance, I mean a more than fifty-fifty chance, that any random idea popping back into the foreground of my consciousness will be an idea that first came to me when I was an adult, rather than one I had repeatedly as a child? — Nicholson Baker

I worked at a local country club that I never belonged to. I did random tasks in the pro shop and supposed to be in charge of the register, but that didn't go so well. They quickly realized I was better with people, not computers. — Shelley Hennig

People encounter one another (thought Ambrogio), bumping into one another like atoms. They do not have their own trajectories and so their actions are random. But when taken together, those random events (so thought Ambrogio) were their own form of consistency, which could be predictable in certain parts. Only He Who created everything knows this in full. — Evgenij Vodolazkin

Happenstance and accidents didn't seem so random. The mystery of the connections intrigued him, but he wasn't going to agonize about them, and he had not yet reached an age where he was interested in analyzing them either. He figured that all the threads of his experience would eventually be sewn together, taking shape in harmony and form to create a glorious work of art. But who would sew those pieces together? Who would make him whole? That was something Ciro thought about a lot. Before — Adriana Trigiani

For everything there is a season. I'd miss having the seasons, people from New York like to say by way of indicating the extraordinary pride they take in not living in Southern California. In fact Southern California does have seasons (it has for example "fire season" or "the season when the fire comes," and it also has the season when the rains comes, but such Southern California seasons, arriving as they do so theatrically as to seem strokes of random fate, do not inexorably suggest the passage of time. Those other seasons, the ones so prized on the East Coast, do. Seasons in Southern California suggest violence, but not necessarily death.
Seasons in New York-the relentless dropping of the leaves, the steady darkening of the days, the blue nights themselves-suggest only death. — Joan Didion

One night I couldn't sleep and I was up and just Googling random stuff and I'm like, 'Hmmm, PETA.' I saw all the videos and I just thought it was horrible, Pickler told People. It's animal cruelty. A lot of it has to do with knowing what happens to the animals and it really bothered me and so I will not eat meat. — Kellie Pickler

But, as the results presented in this book (and others) show, we are all far less rational in our decision making than standard economic theory assumes. Our irrational behaviors are neither random nor senseless-they are systematic and predictable. We all make the same types of mistakes over and over, because of the basic wiring of our brains. So wouldn't it make sense to modify standard economics and move away from naive psychology, which often fails the tests of reason, introspection, and-most important-empirical scrutiny?

Wouldn't economics make a lot more sense if it were based on how people actually behave, instead of how they should behave? As I said in the Introduction, that simple idea is the basis of behavioral economics, an emerging field focused on the (quite intrusive) idea that people do not always behave rationally and that they often make mistakes in their decisions. — Dan Ariely

Random violence makes the news precisely because it is so rare, routine kindness does not make the news precisely because it is so commonplace. (104) — Matt Ridley

There is an old debate," Erdos liked to say, "about whether you create mathematics or just discover it. In other words, are the truths already there, even if we don't yet know them?" Erdos had a clear answer to this question: Mathematical truths are there among the list of absolute truths, and we just rediscover them. Random graph theory, so elegant and simple, seemed to him to belong to the eternal truths. Yet today we know that random networks played little role in assembling our universe. Instead, nature resorted to a few fundamental laws, which will be revealed in the coming chapters. Erdos himself created mathematical truths and an alternative view of our world by developing random graph theory. Not privy to nature's laws in creating the brain and society, Erdos hazarded his best guess in assuming that God enjoys playing dice. His friend Albert Einstein, at Princeton, was convinced of the opposite: "God does not play dice with the universe. — Albert-Laszlo Barabasi

Why don't you just call yourself a lesbian? Random Guy wants to know. The answer seems so obvious. Because I'm not. But he presses further and that's when the answer really becomes clear. It's more than simply the attraction to guys which has always been there, and more than the attraction to women that I'm just beginning to explore. It's about potential, about possibility, about open-mindedness, and especially about making choices based on values and individuals rather than mere gender. — Audrey Beth Stein

Sometimes our mistakes put us exactly where we need to be... I guess that's what I've learned to love about travel... You meet so many random people. You're not so closed off. You're more open to yourself. — Jeff Loveness

A random guy I met at a party I went to in high school told me not to study creative writing because in his opinion studying creative writing as a major sucks the love of writing out of you (he was a creative writing major, so he said he would know). I did not want the love of writing sucked out of me, so I followed his advice (however, I did take a few creative writing workshops at IU and I enjoyed them very much). Instead, I had the love of art sucked out of me. Years later I met that guy from the party again in New York City where I moved after college to be an illustrator, and we got married. — Meg Cabot

Come, let us hasten to a higher plane
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to n
Commingled in an endless Markov chain!
I'll grant thee random access to my heart,
Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love;
And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove,
And in our bound partition never part.
Cancel me not - for what then shall remain?
Abscissas some mantissas, modules, modes,
A root or two, a torus and a node:
The inverse of my verse, a null domain.
- Love and Tensor Algebra — Stanislaw Lem

All this stuff is so mind-blowing to me that I get to do in my life. Throwing the first pitch out at the White Sox game on a random Wednesday? Like who am I? How did I get this life? I'm glad I'm not jaded, and little kids are the least jaded people in the entire world, so it's fun to be around people that still find wonder in how cool things are. — Jonah Hill

There were stalls nestled around the castle the way the lights were, not in rows but in odd spots, as if the stalls had grown there or alighted on random places like birds. There was one stall with ringing chimes that was set halfway up a ruined wall, so the customers had to climb sliding pieces of slate to get to it. There were more stalls set in the grassy hollows among the stones and nestled into the corners of the walls. One woman had actually turned a ruined wall into her stall, brightly colored jars arranged on the jagged, protruding shards of stone.
All through the fragments of a lost castle lit by magic moved the people of the Goblin Market. There was a man hanging up knives alongside wind chimes, which made dangerous and beautiful music as they rang together in the sea breeze. There was a boy who looked about twelve stirring something in a cauldron with a rich-smelling cloud handing over it, and bark cups ranged along his stall. — Sarah Rees Brennan

Once we see, however, that the probability of life originating at random is so utterly miniscule as to make it absurd, it becomes sensible to think that the favorable properties of physics on which life depends are in every respect deliberate ... It is therefore almost inevitable that our own measure of intelligence must reflect ... higher intelligences ... even to the limit of God ... such a theory is so obvious that one wonders why it is not widely accepted as being self-evident. The reasons are psychological rather than scientific. — Fred Hoyle

Random mutations much more easily debilitate genes than improve them, and that this is true even of the helpful mutations. Let me emphasize, our experience with malaria's effects on humans (arguably our most highly studied genetic system) shows that most helpful mutations degrade genes. What's more, as a group the mutations are incoherent, meaning that they are not adding up to some new system. They are just small changes - mostly degradative - in pre-existing, unrelated genes. The take-home lesson is that this is certainly not the kind of process we would expect to build the astonishingly elegant machinery of the cell. If random mutation plus selective pressure substantially trashes the human genome, why should we think that it would be a constructive force in the long term? There is no reason to think so. — Michael J. Behe

It would be silly for a demon to dress up and go trick-or-treating. What would I be anyways, a human girl? Ha, it's funny. I kind of already am playing dress up. I get random treats, only to be taunted that they were but tricks. Turns out, it's not so funny. — Amy Lunderman

So maybe my own life is not so drastic and dreadful...maybe I am just like all those other girls who have come before me with their oily T-zones and random terrible days and bittersweet triumphs, the world billowing out behind them. — Mary O'Connell

As artists, we are so not in control most of the time of the content or the narrative of our characters, and sometimes writing takes a turn and it's not something we necessarily have control over. It's just a lot of random dumb luck, so when things click, you've just got to enjoy it. — Mike Colter

I think [game music] is something that should last with the player. It's interesting because it can't just be some random music, but something that can make its way into the player's heart. In that sense, this not only applies to game music, but I feel very strongly about composing songs that will leave a lasting impressionWhat I must not forget is that it must be entertaining to those who are listening. I don't think there's much else to it, to be honest. I don't do anything too audacious, so as long as the listeners like it, or feel that it's a really great song, then I've done my job. — Yasunori Mitsuda

Enslavement was not merely the antiseptic borrowing of labor -- it is not so easy to get a human being to commit their body against its own elemental interest. And so enslavement must be casual wrath and random manglings, the gashing of heads and brains blown out over the river as the body seeks to escape. It must be rape so regular as to be industrial. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

I mean, there's a lot of other things I could do for money. I could sell autographed ECT machines or rhinestoned mood stabilizers or even Star Wars scented laxatives. But do I do that? Do I do a commercial on television to (attempt to) sell a medication while running around some random backyard with some rented golden retriever laughing and looking cured and totally amazed to be so worry-free while a voice comes on and says, "Reginol is not recommended for wayward fish or Libras with dementia. If you notice swelling in your femur or notice a subtle beam of backlight glowing northward from your anus or the anus of someone you went to school with, call your doctor immediately as this could be a symptom of hydrocephalus that could lead to roughhousing and misguided bloat. Reginol is not recommended for pregnant Nazis or yodelers over seventy. Reginol does not protect you from unpopularity or autism . . . " All — Carrie Fisher

If the incarceration experience doesn't break your spirit, it changes you in a way that you lose many fears. You begin to realize that your life is not ruled by your ego and ambition and that it can end any day at any time. So why worry? You learn that just like on the street, there is life in prison, and random people get there based on the jeopardy of the system. The prisons are filled by people who crossed the law, as well as by those who were incidentally and circumstantially picked and crushed by somebody else's agenda. On the other hand, as a vivid benefit, you become very much independent of material property and learn to appreciate very simple pleasures in life such as the sunlight and morning breeze. — Michael Lewis

The dream has a very striking way of dealing with the category of opposites and contradictions. This is simply disregarded. To the dream 'No' does not seem to exist. In particular, it prefers to draw opposites together into a unity or to represent them as one. Indeed, it also takes the liberty of representing some random element by its wished-for opposite, so that at first one cannot tell which of the possible poles is meant positively or negatively in the dream-thoughts. — Sigmund Freud