Quotes About Random

What's invaluable about actually going to the places you want to write about are the random accidental things that happen. Random, accidental detail is the best way to make a setting convincing. You can of course invent your own random details, and sometimes I will also mash up real incidents.

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.

There is, however, one feature that I would like to suggest should be incorporated in the machines, and that is a 'random element.' Each machine should be supplied with a tape bearing a random series of figures, e.g., 0 and 1 in equal quantities, and this series of figures should be used in the choices made by the machine. This would result in the behaviour of the machine not being by any means completely determined by the experiences to which it was subjected, and would have some valuable uses when one was experimenting with it.

In memory of Emily we would like everyone to go out and do random acts of kindness, random acts of love to your friends or your neighbors or your fellow students because there is no way to make sense of this. It's what Emily would have wanted.

I know if I persist it will pay back in dividends and it always does. What starts to happen is like exercise, the pain goes away. It starts to get easier and the weight starts to get lighter and people start to notice a difference in you and you start to notice a difference in yourself. You find your ability to make decisions is easier; you find you are inspired more often. You find your success increases. You find that your random moments when you're in the flow are no longer random and you can control them. Other people notice the difference.

Although random mutations influenced the course of evolution, their influence was mainly by loss, alteration, and refinement... Never, however, did that one mutation make a wing, a fruit, a woody stem, or a claw appear. Mutations, in summary, tend to induce sickness, death, or deficiencies. No evidence in the vast literature of heredity changes shows unambiguous evidence that random mutation itself, even with geographical isolation of populations, leads to speciation.

Don't say random stuff. It makes me do random things

... the random talk of people who have no chance of immortality and thus can speak their minds out has a setting, often, of lights, streets, houses, human beings, beautiful or grotesque, which will weave itself into the moment for ever.

Sylvie's knowledge, like Izzie's, was random yet far-ranging, 'The sign that one has acquired one's learning from reading novels rather than an education.

I see painting as an evocative magic, and there must always be a random factor in magic, one which must be constantly changed and renewed.

If I liked an idea, even slightly, I would throw some money at it. I've had a lot of random things not work out that people don't know about.

I love the way a story's ending can force you to read backwards. It's as if you are slowly adjusting a kaleidoscope until a random scattering of colored crystals suddenly falls into a beautiful symmetrical pattern.

Loneliness is random; solitude is ritual.

I just went along with political activists and interested in other intellectual interests which I pursued kind of at random. I never had a real college education. I got a degree, but it was just patching together courses here and there.

I brought Sammy inside and put him to bed. Said his prayer with him. “‘Now I lay me down to sleep…’” To me, just random noise. Gibberish. I wasn’t sure exactly what it was, but I felt that, when it came to God, there was a broken promise in there somewhere.

When I was a kid - and I don't know why, it's the most random thing - I wanted to be a speech therapist for little kids. I knew I wanted to do something with kids.

Some people have an inner child that speaks to them. I have an inner old man who just yells random [stuff] at me all day.

Challenger was lost because NASA came to believe its own propaganda. The agency's deeply impacted cultural hubris had it that technology-engineering-would always triumph over random disaster if certain rules were followed. The engineers-turned-technocrats could not bring themselves to accept the psychology of machines with abandoning the core principle of their own faith: equations, geometry, and repetition-physical law, precision design, and testing-must defy chaos.

I remember going with my mom to a random garage sale as a kid and thinking what a cool treasure hunt that whole world was. Only to transition as an adult to think, 'What a gross place that really is.'

One of the great things about the Internet is that people are excited about music and wanna hear a random album from a band somewhere in Romania or something, and to listen to all sorts of stuff from around the world.

Don't let some random comment that you wouldn't have even thought about overshadow something important that you were actually trying to say.

I've met some serious aliens in my life, for sure. I'm sure you've seen a UFO. Haven't all of us seen something flying in the sky, and it's at some random time of night that doesn't make sense, and it's not the shape of a plane? I don't know if I'd go with an alien to space. I would have to feel the alien's vibe. I'm a vibe person.

I've heard that I'm 'the future of tennis.' But that's all just random stuff.

The line between inner and outer landscapes is breaking down. Earthquakes can result from seismic upheavals within the human mind. The whole random universe of the industrial age is breaking down into cryptic fragments.

Man always made, and still makes, grotesque blunders in selecting and measuring forces, taken at random from the heap, but he never made a mistake in the value he set on the whole, which he symbolized as unity and worshipped as God. To this day, his attitude towards it has never changed, though science can no longer give to force a name.

Don’t knock on any random door like a beggar. Reach your long hand out to another door, beyond where you go on the street, the street where everyone says, "How are you?" and no one says How aren’t you?

[T]hat I could find company and consolation and hope in an object pulled almost at random from a bookshelf--felt akin to an instance of religious grace.

Deep inside I feel that this world we live in is really a big, huge, monumental symphonic orchestra. I believe that in its primordial form all of creation is sound and that it's not just random sound, that it's music. You've heard the expression, music of the spheres? Well, that's a very literal phrase. In the Gospels, we read, "And the Lord God made man from the dust of the earth and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living soul." That 'breath of life' to me is the music of life and it permeates every fiber of creation.

When my first daughter was born, my husband held her in his hands and said, 'My God, she's so beautiful.' I unwrapped the baby from her blankets. She was average size, with long thin fingers and a random assortment of toes. Her eyes were close set, and she had her father's hooked nose. It looked better on him.

In a world that operates largely at random, coincidences are to be expected, but any one of them must always be mistrusted.

I sell my first book to Random House, a memoir of my years as a war photographer, for twice my NBC salary.

You learn in life that a lot of things are the result of effort, but some things, in terms of scale, are random.

Technology has changed, and we need to figure out how to improve the archaic way of what makes a hit, or how to determine how many viewers are watching beyond some people with Nielsen boxes in a small percentage of homes in random areas.

I don't mind being recognized, it's just that I have a bit of social anxiety, and this situation has increased it. The idea of having to be 'on' and social at random times can be difficult. I'll be out in the morning, someone comes and takes a picture, and then I discover I have toothpaste on my face.

At the risk of sounding pedestrian, I'll be completely honest: the first thing I do in the morning is check Google News, partially because it seems sort of random and unbiased and partially because I tend to stay in hotels that don't necessarily have the fastest Internet connections.

You don’t owe prettiness to anyone. Not to your boyfriend/spouse/partner, not to your co-workers, especially not to random men on the street. You don’t owe it to your mother, you don’t owe it to your children, you don’t owe it to civilization in general. Prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked ‘female’.

Like fanning through a deck of cards, my mind flashes on the thousand chances, trivial to profound, that converged to re-create this place. Any arbitrary turning along the way and I would be elsewhere; I would be different. Where did the expression "a place in the sun" first come from? My rational thought process cling always to the idea of free will, random event; my blood, however, streams easily along a current of fate.

I love it when you have a lull in the day and you turn on the TV and a random movie is on that you either have never seen or haven't seen in years. Like "Coming to America" (1988) or "Misery" (1990) or "Moonstruck" (1987).

Knowing there is a structure, hidden or felt, to the random gives pleasure.

When you assume negative intent, you're angry. If you take away that anger and assume positive intent, you will be amazed. Your emotional quotient goes up because you are no longer almost random in your response.

Living "in" a story, being part of a narrative, is much more satisfying than living without one. I don't always know what narrative it is, because I'm living my life and not always reflecting on it, but as I edit these pages I am aware that I have an urge to see my sometimes random wandering as having a plot, a purpose guided by some underlying story.

You can't shape me anymore. I am the uncontrolled element, the random act. I am forward movement in time. You think you can see me? Then tell me, who am I? You don't know.

I call my mom and talk to her about random stuff I saw on the Internet. That's kind of the only constant in my day-to-day.

They’re a nasty bunch of people. The Riot Club’s sole purpose is to celebrate wealth, elitism, hedonism, and excess - just random acts of destruction and chauvinism, which is interesting because our Prime Minister, our Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Mayor of London were are a part of this club.

My dad noticed some kind of talent on piano when he asked me to play a couple random songs on piano when I was 6 and I just did it. I attempted lessons but I was just so bad at reading notes. I would read "Three Blind Mice" by ear, so learning notes was almost impossible.

Apparently there is a great discovery or insight which our culture is deliberately designed to suppress, distort, and ignore. That is that nature is some kind of minded entity. That nature is not simply the random flight of atoms through electromagnetic fields. Nature is not the empty, despiritualized , lumpen matter that we inherit from modern physics. But it is instead a kind of intelligence, a kind of mind.

Books are everywhere; and always the same sense of adventure fills us. Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack. Besides, in this random miscellaneous company we may rub against some complete stranger who will, with luck, turn into the best friend we have in the world.

Random chance plays a huge part in everybody's life.