Chaos Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Chaos. Here they are! All 100 of them:

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You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.
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Friedrich Nietzsche
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Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.
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Henry Adams
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We are the choices we make.
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Patrick Ness (The Knife of Never Letting Go (Chaos Walking, #1))
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I accept chaos, I'm not sure whether it accepts me.
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Bob Dylan
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A smile puts you on the right track. A smile makes the world a beautiful place. When you lose your smile, you lose your way in the chaos of life.
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Roy T. Bennett (The Light in the Heart)
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In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity
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Sun Tzu (A Arte da Guerra)
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And I’d choose you; in a hundred lifetimes, in a hundred worlds, in any version of reality, I’d find you and I’d choose you.
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Kiersten White (The Chaos of Stars)
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Our real discoveries come from chaos, from going to the place that looks wrong and stupid and foolish.
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Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)
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Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos… to celebrate a world that lies spread out around us like a bewildering and stupendous dream.
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John Cheever
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If complete and utter chaos was lightning, then he'd be the sort to stand on a hilltop in a thunderstorm wearing wet copper armour and shouting 'All gods are bastards!
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Terry Pratchett (The Color of Magic (Discworld, #1; Rincewind, #1))
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One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.
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Friedrich Nietzsche
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It's not that you should never love something so much that it can control you. It's that you need to love something that much so you can never be controlled. It's not a weakness. It's your best strength.
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Patrick Ness (The Ask and the Answer (Chaos Walking, #2))
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I felt very still and empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.
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Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
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Without a filter, a man is just chaos walking.
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Patrick Ness (The Knife of Never Letting Go (Chaos Walking, #1))
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In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.
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C.G. Jung
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To say you have no choice is to relieve yourself of responsibility.
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Patrick Ness (Monsters of Men (Chaos Walking, #3))
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It's a cruel and random world, but the chaos is all so beautiful.
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Hiromu Arakawa
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I would like to see anyone, prophet, king or God, convince a thousand cats to do the same thing at the same time.
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Neil Gaiman
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Chaos is found in greatest abundance wherever order is being sought. It always defeats order, because it is better organized.
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Terry Pratchett (Interesting Times: The Play)
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Normal is an illusion. What is normal for the spider is chaos for the fly.
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Charles Addams
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Life is nothing without a little chaos to make it interesting.
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Amelia Atwater-Rhodes (Demon in My View (Den of Shadows, #2))
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She is catalyst. She is chaos. I can see why he loves her.
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Amie Kaufman (Illuminae (The Illuminae Files, #1))
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Chaos is what we've lost touch with. This is why it is given a bad name. It is feared by the dominant archetype of our world, which is Ego, which clenches because its existence is defined in terms of control.
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Terence McKenna
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I didn't fall in love with you. I walked into love with you, with my eyes wide open, choosing to take every step along the way. I do believe in fate and destiny, but I also believe we are only fated to do the things that we'd choose anyway. And I'd choose you; in a hundred lifetimes, in a hundred worlds, in any version of reality, I'd find you and I'd choose you
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Kiersten White (The Chaos of Stars)
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I can believe things that are true and things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the Beatles and Marilyn Monroe and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen - I believe that people are perfectable, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkled lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone's ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the common cold like martians in War of the Worlds. I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman. I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumble bee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.
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Neil Gaiman (American Gods (American Gods, #1))
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Without access to true chaos, we'll never have true peace. Unless everything can get worse, it won't get any better.
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Chuck Palahniuk (Choke)
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Girls like her were born in a storm. They have lightning in their souls. Thunder in their hearts. And chaos in their bones.
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Nikita Gill
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In chaos, there is fertility.
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AnaΓ―s Nin
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But a knife ain't just a thing, is it? It's a choice, it's something you do. A knife says yes or no, cut or not, die or don't. A knife takes a decision out of your hand and puts it in the world and it never goes back again.
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Patrick Ness (The Knife of Never Letting Go (Chaos Walking, #1))
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Passion makes a person stop eating, sleeping, working, feeling at peace. A lot of people are frightened because, when it appears, it demolishes all the old things it finds in its path. No one wants their life thrown into chaos. That is why a lot of people keep that threat under control, and are somehow capable of sustaining a house or a structure that is already rotten. They are the engineers of the superseded. Other people think exactly the opposite: they surrender themselves without a second thought, hoping to find in passion the solutions to all their problems. They make the other person responsible for their happiness and blame them for their possible unhappiness. They are either euphoric because something marvelous has happened or depressed because something unexpected has just ruined everything. Keeping passion at bay or surrendering blindly to it - which of these two attitudes is the least destructive? I don't know.
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Paulo Coelho (Eleven Minutes)
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Chaos is rejecting all you have learned, Chaos is being yourself.
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Emil M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay)
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It's hard to believe in coincidence, but it's even harder to believe in anything else.
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John Green (Will Grayson, Will Grayson)
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Chaos is merely order waiting to be deciphered.
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JosΓ© Saramago (The Double)
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In the midst of movement and chaos, keep stillness inside of you.
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Deepak Chopra
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Chaos is more freedom; in fact, total freedom. But no meaning. I want to be free to act, and I also want my actions to mean something.
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Audrey Niffenegger (The Time Traveler's Wife)
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[Horror fiction] shows us that the control we believe we have is purely illusory, and that every moment we teeter on chaos and oblivion.
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Clive Barker
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There are only patterns, patterns on top of patterns, patterns that affect other patterns. Patterns hidden by patterns. Patterns within patterns. If you watch close, history does nothing but repeat itself. What we call chaos is just patterns we haven't recognized. What we call random is just patterns we can't decipher. what we can't understand we call nonsense. What we can't read we call gibberish. There is no free will. There are no variables.
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Chuck Palahniuk (Survivor)
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Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today and creates a vision for tomorrow.
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Melody Beattie
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All the most powerful emotions come from chaos -fear,anger,love- especially love. Love is chaos itself. Think about it! Love makes no sense. It shakes you up and spins you around. And then, eventually , it falls apart.
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Kirsten Miller (The Eternal Ones (Eternal Ones, #1))
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The first thing you find out when yer dog learns to talk is that dogs don't got nothing much to say. About anything. "Need a poo, Todd." "Shutup, Manchee." "Poo. Poo, Todd." "I said shut it.
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Patrick Ness (The Knife of Never Letting Go (Chaos Walking, #1))
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It's not how we fall. It's how we get back up again.
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Patrick Ness (Monsters of Men (Chaos Walking, #3))
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Travelling's not something you're good at. It's something you do. Like breathing. You can't work too much at it, or it feels like work. You have to surrender yourself to the chaos. To the accidents.
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Gayle Forman (Just One Day (Just One Day, #1))
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I for one like chaos. Chaos looks good on me.
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Ally Carter (Uncommon Criminals (Heist Society, #2))
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The creation of a single world comes from a huge number of fragments and chaos.
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Hayao Miyazaki
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We have to heal our wounded world. The chaos, despair, and senseless destruction we see today are a result of the alienation that people feel from each other and their environment.
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Michael Jackson
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If chaos is a necessary step in the organization of one's universe, then I was well on my way.
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Wendelin Van Draanen (Flipped)
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Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man.
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Henry Adams (The Education of Henry Adams)
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In the space between chaos and shape there was another chance.
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Jeanette Winterson (The World and Other Places: Stories)
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You can only find out what you actually believe (rather than what you think you believe) by watching how you act. You simply don’t know what you believe, before that. You are too complex to understand yourself.
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Jordan B. Peterson (12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos)
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When you lose your smile, you lose your way in the chaos of life.
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Roy T. Bennett
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No woman should be made to fear that she was not enough.
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Samantha Shannon (The Priory of the Orange Tree (The Roots of Chaos, #1))
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Choices may be unbelievably hard but they're never impossible. To say you have no choice is to release yourself from responsibility and that's not how a person with integrity acts.
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Patrick Ness (Monsters of Men (Chaos Walking, #3))
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When you have something to say, silence is a lie.
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Jordan B. Peterson (12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos)
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Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded: it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself.
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Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (Frankenstein)
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I sung of Chaos and Eternal Night, Taught by the heav'nly Muse to venture down The dark descent, and up to reascend...
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John Milton (Paradise Lost)
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In fact, the mere act of opening the box will determine the state of the cat, although in this case there were three determinate states the cat could be in: these being Alive, Dead, and Bloody Furious.
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Terry Pratchett (Lords and Ladies (Discworld, #14; Witches, #4))
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It was her chaos that made her beautiful.Β 
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Atticus Poetry (Love Her Wild)
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Maybe it's not in the perfection of life that things make sense, but in the chaos.
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Rachel Van Dyken (Ruin (Ruin, #1))
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Then I thought, boy, isn't that just typical? You wait and wait and wait for something, and then when it happens, you feel sad.
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Sharon Creech (Absolutely Normal Chaos)
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The Noise is a man unfiltered, and without a filter, a man is just chaos walking.
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Patrick Ness (The Knife of Never Letting Go (Chaos Walking, #1))
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Somewhere along the way we all go a bit mad. So burn, let go and dive into the horror, because maybe it’s the chaos which helps us find where we belong.
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Robert M. Drake
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This is the biggest mistake I could think would save me. I wanted to give up the idea that I had any control. Shake things up. To be saved by chaos. To see if I could cope, I wanted to force myself to grow again. To explode my comfort zone.
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Chuck Palahniuk
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In this world of numbness and information overload, the ability to feel, my boy, is a rare gift indeed.
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Patrick Ness (The Ask and the Answer (Chaos Walking, #2))
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I fear being like everyone I hate, I fear failure, I fear losing control. I love balancing between chaos and control with everything I do. I always have a fear of going one way or another, getting lost in something, or losing everything to get lost in. And I fear being a completely acceptable sheep in society.
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Marilyn Manson
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I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos. The pictures they paint, the music they compose, the books they write, and the lives they lead. Of all these the richest in beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art.
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W. Somerset Maugham (The Painted Veil)
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Faith with proof is no faith at all.
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Patrick Ness (The Ask and the Answer (Chaos Walking, #2))
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But I'm shocked by the tenderness in his voice. The sincerity with which he wants to know. He's like a feral dog, crazed and wild, thirsty for chaos, simultaneously aching for recognition and acceptance. Love.
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Tahereh Mafi (Shatter Me (Shatter Me, #1))
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War makes monsters out of men.
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Patrick Ness
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And if you think tough men are dangerous, wait until you see what weak men are capable of.
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Jordan B. Peterson (12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos)
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We may be small, and we may be young, but we will shake the world for our beliefs.
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Samantha Shannon (The Priory of the Orange Tree (The Roots of Chaos, #1))
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Wild woman are an unexplainable spark of life. They ooze freedom and seek awareness, they belong to nobody but themselves yet give a piece of who they are to everyone they meet. If you have met one, hold on to her, she'll allow you into her chaos but she'll also show you her magic.
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Nikki Rowe
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I'll love you until the day after forever.
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Kami Garcia (Beautiful Chaos (Caster Chronicles, #3))
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Here's what I think," I say and my voice is stronger and thoughts are coming, thoughts that trickle into my noise like whispers of truth. "I think maybe everybody falls," I say. "I think maybe we all do. And I don't think that's the asking." I pull on her arms gently to make sure she's listening. "I think the asking is whether we get back up again.
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Patrick Ness (The Knife of Never Letting Go (Chaos Walking, #1))
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Hope may be the thing that pulls you forward, may be the thing that keeps you going, but that it's dangerous, that it's painful and risky, that it's making a dare in the world and when has the world ever let us win a dare?
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Patrick Ness (The Knife of Never Letting Go (Chaos Walking, #1))
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Why then, O brawling love! O loving hate! O any thing, of nothing first create! O heavy lightness, serious vanity, Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms, Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health, Still-waking sleep, that is not what it is! This love feel I, that feel no love in this.
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William Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet)
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To stand up straight with your shoulders back is to accept the terrible responsibility of life, with eyes wide open. It means deciding to voluntarily transform the chaos of potential into the realities of habitable order. It means adopting the burden of self-conscious vulnerability, and accepting the end of the unconscious paradise of childhood, where finitude and mortality are only dimly comprehended. It means willingly undertaking the sacrifices necessary to generate a productive and meaningful reality (it means acting to please God, in the ancient language).
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Jordan B. Peterson (12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos)
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Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces together.
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Ray Bradbury (Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You)
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Do as little harm to others as you can; make any sacrifice for your true friends; be responsible for yourself and ask nothing of others; and grab all the fun you can. Don't give much thought to yesterday, don't worry about tomorrow, live in the moment, and trust that your existence has meaning even when the world seems to be all blind chance and chaos. When life lands a hammer blow in your face, do your best to respond to the hammer as if it had been a cream pie.
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Dean Koontz
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My life before him was so simple and decided, now after him...It's just...After.
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Anna Todd (After (After, #1))
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My dear, In the midst of hate, I found there was, within me, an invincible love. In the midst of tears, I found there was, within me, an invincible smile. In the midst of chaos, I found there was, within me, an invincible calm. I realized, through it all, that… In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer. And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back. Truly yours, Albert Camus” I like this because only one part is usually quoted but the full quote has such symmetry.
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Albert Camus
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War is like a monster," he says, almost to himself. "War is the devil. It starts and it consumes and it grows and grows and grows." He's looking at me now. "And otherwise normal men become monsters, too.
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Patrick Ness (The Knife of Never Letting Go (Chaos Walking, #1))
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I’ll find youβ€” Keep calling for me, Violaβ€” Cuz here I come.
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Patrick Ness (Monsters of Men (Chaos Walking, #3))
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When I first met you, that's what I remember. I looked up at the sky and thought, I'm going to love this person because even the sky looks different.
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Margaret Stohl (Beautiful Chaos (Caster Chronicles, #3))
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One more dance along the razor's edge finished. Almost dead yesterday, maybe dead tomorrow, but alive, gloriously alive, today.
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Robert Jordan (Lord of Chaos (The Wheel of Time, #6))
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Cuz how do you know yer alive if you don't hurt?
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Patrick Ness (The Ask and the Answer (Chaos Walking, #2))
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You can't say everything, so you don't say nothing.
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Patrick Ness (The Knife of Never Letting Go (Chaos Walking, #1))
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She imagines him imagining her. This is her salvation. In spirit she walks the city, traces its labyrinths, its dingy mazes: each assignation, each rendezvous, each door and stair and bed. What he said, what she said, what they did, what they did then. Even the times they argued, fought, parted, agonized, rejoined. How they’d loved to cut themselves on each other, taste their own blood. We were ruinous together, she thinks. But how else can we live, these days, except in the midst of ruin?
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Margaret Atwood (The Blind Assassin)
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How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and orderβ€”willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living.
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Annie Dillard (The Writing Life)
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I get that you're scared and that you've been hurt. But doing what is easy and safe is no way to live, and a life without passion and love is so far beneath what you deserve.
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Kiersten White (The Chaos of Stars)
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Until a few days ago, humans had been little more than legend to him, and now here he was in their world. It was like stepping into the pages of a book -- a book alive with color and fragrance, filth and chaos -- and the blue-haired girl moved through it all like a fairy through a story, the light treating her differently than it did others, the air seemed to gather around her like held breath. As if this whole place was a story about her.
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Laini Taylor (Daughter of Smoke & Bone (Daughter of Smoke & Bone, #1))
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Man is the Reasoning Animal. Such is the claim. I think it is open to dispute. Indeed, my experiments have proven to me that he is the Unreasoning Animal... In truth, man is incurably foolish. Simple things which other animals easily learn, he is incapable of learning. Among my experiments was this. In an hour I taught a cat and a dog to be friends. I put them in a cage. In another hour I taught them to be friends with a rabbit. In the course of two days I was able to add a fox, a goose, a squirrel and some doves. Finally a monkey. They lived together in peace; even affectionately. Next, in another cage I confined an Irish Catholic from Tipperary, and as soon as he seemed tame I added a Scotch Presbyterian from Aberdeen. Next a Turk from Constantinople; a Greek Christian from Crete; an Armenian; a Methodist from the wilds of Arkansas; a Buddhist from China; a Brahman from Benares. Finally, a Salvation Army Colonel from Wapping. Then I stayed away for two whole days. When I came back to note results, the cage of Higher Animals was all right, but in the other there was but a chaos of gory odds and ends of turbans and fezzes and plaids and bones and flesh--not a specimen left alive. These Reasoning Animals had disagreed on a theological detail and carried the matter to a Higher Court.
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Mark Twain (Letters from the Earth: Uncensored Writings)
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I want someone to sit beside after the day's pursuit and all its anguish, after its listening, and its waitings, and its suspicions. After quarrelling and reconciliation I need privacy - to be alone with you, to set this hubbub in order. For I am as neat as a cat in my habits.
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Virginia Woolf (The Waves)
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His noise is getting quieter, but I can still see it there still- See how he feels the skin of my hand against his, see how he wants to take it and press it against his mouth, how he wants to breathe in the smell of me and how beautiful I look to him, how strong after all that illness, and how he wants to just lightly touch my neck, just there, and how he wants to take me in his arms and- "Oh, God," he says, looking away suddenly. "Viola, I'm sorry, I didn't mean-" But I just put my hand to the back of his neck- And he says, "Viola-?" And I pull myself towards him- And I kiss him. And it feels like, finally.
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Patrick Ness (Monsters of Men (Chaos Walking, #3))
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APPLY WITHIN You once told me You wanted to find Yourself in the world - And I told you to First apply within, To discover the world within you. You once told me You wanted to save The world from all its wars - And I told you to First save yourself From the world, And all the wars You put yourself Through. APPLY WITHIN by Suzy Kassem
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Suzy Kassem
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Thermodynamic miracles... events with odds against so astronomical they're effectively impossible, like oxygen spontaneously becoming gold. I long to observe such a thing. And yet, in each human coupling, a thousand million sperm vie for a single egg. Multiply those odds by countless generations, against the odds of your ancestors being alive; meeting; siring this precise son; that exact daughter... Until your mother loves a man she has every reason to hate, and of that union, of the thousand million children competing for fertilization, it was you, only you, that emerged. To distill so specific a form from that chaos of improbability, like turning air to gold... that is the crowning unlikelihood. The thermodynamic miracle. But...if me, my birth, if that's a thermodynamic miracle... I mean, you could say that about anybody in the world!. Yes. Anybody in the world. ..But the world is so full of people, so crowded with these miracles that they become commonplace and we forget... I forget. We gaze continually at the world and it grows dull in our perceptions. Yet seen from the another's vantage point. As if new, it may still take our breath away. Come...dry your eyes. For you are life, rarer than a quark and unpredictable beyond the dreams of Heisenberg; the clay in which the forces that shape all things leave their fingerprints most clearly. Dry your eyes... and let's go home.
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Alan Moore (Watchmen)
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As soon as we are alone,...inner chaos opens up in us. This chaos can be so disturbing and so confusing that we can hardly wait to get busy again. Entering a private room and shutting the door, therefore, does not mean that we immediatel;y shut ou all our iner doubts, anxieities, fears, bad memories, unresolved conflicts, angry feelings and impulsive desires. On the contrary, when we have removed our outer distraction, we often find that our inner distraction manifest themselves to us in full force. We often use the outer distractions to shield ourselves from the interior noises. This makes the discipline of solitude all the more important.
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Henri J.M. Nouwen (Making All Things New and Other Classics)
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I mean, I don’t know how the world broke. And I don’t know if there’s a God who can help us fix it. But the fact that the world is broken - I absolutely believe that. Just look around us. Every minute - every single second - there are a million things you could be thinking about. A million things you could be worrying about. Our world - don’t you just feel we’re becoming more fragmented? I used to think that when I got older, the world would make so much more sense. But you know what? The older I get, the more confusing it is to me. The more complicated it is. Harder. You’d think we’d be getting better at it. But there’s just more and more chaos. The pieces - they’re everywhere. And nobody knows what to do about it. I find myself grasping, Nick. You know that feeling? That feeling when you just want the right thing to fall into the right place, not only because it’s right, but because it would mean that such a thing is still possible? I want to believe that.
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Rachel Cohn (Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist)
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Because children grow up, we think a child's purpose is to grow up. But a child's purpose is to be a child. Nature doesn't disdain what lives only for a day. It pours the whole of itself into the each moment. We don't value the lily less for not being made of flint and built to last. Life's bounty is in its flow, later is too late. Where is the song when it's been sung? The dance when it's been danced? It's only we humans who want to own the future, too. We persuade ourselves that the universe is modestly employed in unfolding our destination. We note the haphazard chaos of history by the day, by the hour, but there is something wrong with the picture. Where is the unity, the meaning, of nature's highest creation? Surely those millions of little streams of accident and wilfulness have their correction in the vast underground river which, without a doubt, is carrying us to the place where we're expected! But there is no such place, that's why it's called utopia. The death of a child has no more meaning than the death of armies, of nations. Was the child happy while he lived? That is a proper question, the only question. If we can't arrange our own happiness, it's a conceit beyond vulgarity to arrange the happiness of those who come after us.
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Tom Stoppard (The Coast of Utopia (Box Set))
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Do you know I've been sitting here thinking to myself: that if I didn't believe in life, if I lost faith in the woman I love, lost faith in the order of things, were convinced in fact that everything is a disorderly, damnable, and perhaps devil-ridden chaos, if I were struck by every horror of man's disillusionment -- still I should want to live. Having once tasted of the cup, I would not turn away from it till I had drained it! At thirty though, I shall be sure to leave the cup even if I've not emptied it, and turn away -- where I don't know. But till I am thirty I know that my youth will triumph over everything -- every disillusionment, every disgust with life. I've asked myself many times whether there is in the world any despair that could overcome this frantic thirst for life. And I've come to the conclusion that there isn't, that is until I am thirty.
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Fyodor Dostoevsky (The Brothers Karamazov)
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She loved him. But he didn’t know how to love. He could talk about love. He could see love and feel love. But he couldn’t give love. He could make love. But he couldn’t make promises. She had desperately wanted his promises. She wanted his heart, knew she couldn’t have it so she took what she could get. Temporary bliss. Passionate highs and lows. Withdrawal and manipulation. He only stayed long enough to take what he needed and keep moving. If he stopped moving, he would self-destruct. If he stopped wandering, he would have to face himself. He chose to stay in the dark where he couldn’t see. If he exposed himself and the sun came out, he’d see his shadow. He was deathly afraid of his shadow. She saw his shadow, loved it, understood it. Saw potential in it. She thought her love would change him. He pushed and he pulled, tested boundaries, thinking she would never leave. He knew he was hurting her, but didn’t know how to share anything but pain. He was only comfortable in chaos. Claiming souls before they could claim him. Her love, her body, she had given to him and he’d taken with such feigned sincerity, absorbing every drop of her. His dark heart concealed. She’d let him enter her spirit and stroke her soul where everything is love and sensation and surrender. Wide open, exposed to deception. It had never occurred to her that this desire was not love. It was blinding the way she wanted him. She couldn’t see what was really happening, only what she wanted to happen. She suspected that he would always seek to minimize the risk of being split open, his secrets revealed. He valued his soul’s privacy far more than he valued the intimacy of sincere connection so he kept his distance at any and all costs. Intimacy would lead to his undoingβ€”in his mind, an irrational and indulgent mistake. When she discovered his indiscretions, she threw love in his face and beat him with it. Somewhere deep down, in her labyrinth, her intricacy, the darkest part of her soul, she relished the mayhem. She felt a sense of privilege for having such passion in her life. He stirred her core. The place she dared not enter. The place she could not stir for herself. But something wasn’t right. His eyes were cold and dark. His energy, unaffected. He laughed at her and her antics, told her she was a mess. Frantic, she looked for love hiding in his eyes, in his face, in his stance, and she found nothing but disdain. And her heart stopped.
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G.G. Renee Hill (The Beautiful Disruption)