My work reflects a relationship to the built world that shifts between control and randomness, strangeness and beauty, comfort and fear.

There are patterns because we try to find them. A desperate attempt at order because we can’t face the terror that it might all be random.

For what are myths if not the imposing of order on phenomena that do not possess order in themselves? And all myths, however they differ from philosophical systems and scientific theories, share this with them,...

The two go hand in hand like a dance: chance flirts with necessity, randomness with determinism. To be sure, it is from this interchange that novelty and creativity arise in Nature, thereby yielding unique forms...

We’re just lines and angles.

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

… Nature almost surely operates by combining chance with necessity, randomness with determinism…

If you hear a “prominent” economist using the word ‘equilibrium,’ or ‘normal distribution,’ do not argue with him; just ignore him, or try to put a rat down his shirt.

Vimes took the view that life was so full of things happening erratically in all directions that the chances of any of them making some kind of relevant sense were remote in the extreme. Colon,...

I am the WhoBob, but NOT the WHoBob Machine. That would be Dale Elad, who’s also the lead singer of Palindrome Lover.

Nothing’s random. Even if it looks that way, it’s just because you don’t know the causes.

Every genuinely new technology has a genuinely new way of breaking – and every now and then, those malfunctions open a new door to the adjacent possible. Sometimes the way a new technology breaks is...

I have no brothers or sisters, so I get all my sibling love. But since I can’t take what’s already mine, I end up giving it all to my cat.

In the midst of the ubiquitous dealings with prostituted signs, the thing-poem was capable of opening up the prospect of returning to credible experiences of meaning. It did this by tying language to the gold...

Creativity is the ability to introduce order into the randomness of nature.

He said that the principal function of music was to organize the details into harmonies that were intended to make us forget that there was randomness all around us. The same, he said, could be...

There’s a lot of randomness in the decisions that people make.

We all experience many freakish and unexpected events – you have to be open to suffering a little. The philosopher Schopenhauer talked about how out of the randomness, there is an apparent intention in the...

[The sound of the wind] was just more proof that the workings of the world were random, that beauty, like suffering, was meaningless, that human life was as pointless as waves on sand.

Everything we care about lies somewhere in the middle, where pattern and randomness interlace.

An unlikely event is likely to happen because there are so many unlikely events that could happen.

Importance of the random: keep brushing up against people, books, experiences we don’t yet know what to do with.

I wore a groove in the kitchen floor with endless trips to the fridge, hoping against hope that I had somehow missed a plateful of cold sausages on the previous 4,000 excursions. Then, for no...

El universo sería un despelote si las cosas no fueran al azar.

The world is big in some ways, and so small in others.

The genome is as complicated and indeterminate as ordinary life, because it is ordinary life. This should come as a relief. Simple determinism, whether of the genetics or environmental kind, is a depressing prospect for...

Only dead fishes go with the flow.. I guess that make me a dead fish!

Then there is the cosmologist, who views himself as nothing but a manipulation of atoms; his mind configured out of randomness into the tool a vast, blind universe might use to perceive itself. If this...

Strategy is methodical, but the one who steers chaos and randomness can steer God.

From where we stand the rain seems random. If we could stand somewhere else, we would see the order in it.