Jumble Quotes

It was a daunting prospect, because it was all such a jumble, and there was also so much I didn't know and perhaps never would. But then again, I wasn't sure that in itself was a problem. The truth of something can be in the feeling of it as much as the fact. ~ Alex North

The possible or impossible for Allah Most High involves the divine attribute of qudra or omnipotence, "what He can do". This attribute in turn relates exclusively to the intrinsically possible, not to what is intrinsically impossible, as Allah says, "Verily Allah has power over every thing" (Qur'an 20:29), "thing" being something that in principle can exist. For example, if one asks "Can Allah create square circle?" the answer is that His omnipotence does not relate to it, for a square circle does not refer to anything that in principle could exist: the speaker does not have a distinct idea of what he means, but is merely using a jumble of words.
"On the validity of all religions in the thought of ibn Al-'Arabi and Emir 'Abd al-Qadir: a letter to `Abd al-Matin ~ Nuh Ha Mim Keller

The Jumble Shop would be one place where we'd sometimes accumulate down in the Village. I think it might be just a place that's unknown that was right around the corner from wherever it was that we met. ~ Lee Krasner

The Ad♥rkable Manifesto

1. We have nothing to declare but our dorkiness.
2. Jumble sales are our shopping malls.
3. Better to make cookies than be a cookie-cutter.
4. Suffering doesn't necessarily improve you but it does give you something to blog about.
5. Experiment with Photoshop, hair dye, nail polish and cupcake flavours but never drugs.
6. Don't follow leaders, be one.
7. Necessity is the mother of customisation.
8. Puppies make everything better.
9. Quiet girls rarely make history.
10. Never shield your oddness, but wear your oddness like a shield. ~ Sarra Manning

the way of the sick soul seems unmanly and diseased.' This was the fault line, the precise point where my mind bifurcated. I longed to have a mystical experience that would fuse these parts together. I yearned for an unequivocal, undivided mind and a soul of 'sky-blue tint'. A shadow lay across my soul. I could glimpse it, feel its weight. But what it was or why it was there I could not fathom. I found James's pragmatism reassuring and steadying, in contrast to Nietzsche, that pyschopomp of misguided youth, to whom the ego was just a jumble of unrelated thoughts that only assume a semblance of order after the fact. ~ Magda Szubanski

Photography is inherently an analytic discipline. Where a painter starts with a blank canvas and builds a picture, a photographer starts with the messiness of the world and selects a picture. A photographer standing before houses and streets and people and trees and artifacts of a culture imposes an order on the scene - simplifies the jumble by giving it structure. He or she imposes this order by choosing a vantage point, choosing a frame, choosing a moment of exposure, and by selecting a plane of focus. ~ Stephen Shore

Nothing, until the ground comes up to meet you, and you land in a jumble of pain and shattered bones; and the scream you didn't think you had in you scrapes your throat raw as you let it out - like the first, shocked breath of a baby newly born into a universe of suffering. ~ Aliette De Bodard

I have to keep things vague, jumble up all the men, the lovers and the exes, but I tell myself that's OK, because it doesn't matter who they are. It matters how they make me feel. ~ Paula Hawkins

Sometimes, life can feel like Scrabble. You know you've got words in there somewhere, but no matter how many times you rearrange the letters, you can't seem to make sense of the jumble. Then you glance up at the person you're playing with and see him looking at you, and it's as if by simply being in your life, he's introduced you to yourself. And you look back down at your letters and everything you couldn't see before clicks into place, explained, decoded. ~ Tyler Oakley

The Kingdom of Heaven," said the Lord Christ, "is among you." But what, precisely, is the Kingdom of Heaven? You cannot point to existing specimens, saying, "Lo, here!" or "Lo, there!" You can only experience it. But what is it like, so that when we experience it we may recognize it? Well, it is a change, like being born again and relearning everything from the start. It is secret, living power - like yeast. It is something that grows, like seed. It is precious like buried treasure, like a rich pearl, and you have to pay for it. It is a sharp cleavage through the rich jumble of things which life presents: like fish and rubbish in a draw-net, like wheat and tares; like wisdom and folly; and it carries with it a kind of menacing finality; it is new, yet in a sense it was always there - like turning out a cupboard and finding there your own childhood as well as your present self; it makes demands, it is like an invitation to a royal banquet - gratifying, but not to be disregarded, and you have to live up to it; where it is equal, it seems unjust; where it is just it is clearly not equal - as with the single pound, the diverse talents, the labourers in the vineyard, you have what you bargained for; it knows no compromise between an uncalculating mercy and a terrible justice - like the unmerciful servant, you get what you give; it is helpless in your hands like the King's Son, but if you slay it, it will judge you; it was from the foundations of the world; it is to come; it is her ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

This exquisite state of unconcerned immersion in oneself is not, unfortunately, of long duration. It is liable to be disturbed from inside. As though sprung from nowhere, moods, feelings, desires, worries and even thoughts incontinently rise up, in a meaningless jumble ... The only successful way of rendering this disturbance inoperative is to keep on breathing quietly and unconcernedly, to enter into friendly relations with whatever appears on the scene, to accustom oneself to it, to look at it equably and at last grow weary of looking. ~ Eugen Herrigel

Some things you just can't explain. You don't even try. You don't know where to start. All your sentences would jumble up like a giant knot if you opened your mouth. Any words you used would come out wrong. ~ R.J. Palacio

I knew I wasn't thinking right, that I was little more than a jumble of emotions and half sentences. I thought in colors, and saw in bursts of silence. ~ C.D. Reiss

Quite soon my office was a jumble of broken bits of rocks, and needles, and old monographs, all coated in fine, limy dust. I still work in an identical office today. Tidy people's eyes go all peculiar when they come into it. I have a special small padded seat for them to collapse into. ~ Richard Fortey

What is enthralling and illuminating about The Metaphysical Club is its portraits of individuals and their milieus. Menand is wonderfully deft at evoking a climate of ideas or a cultural sensibility, embodying it in a character, and moving his characters into and out of one another's lives. What might have been a jumble of intellectual movements and colorful minor figures ( ... ) is instead a subtle weave of entertaining narrative and astute interpretation. ~ George Scialabba

I don't like to read contemporary fiction while writing - I need a sense of isolation, a kind of silence, and I don't want a jumble of other people's voices or visions getting in my way. Nineteenth-century voices don't create static in that silence. ~ Cynthia Ozick

We need librarians who can handle this tremendous jumble of information that is in cyberspace. ~ Robert Darnton

What we call the personality is often a jumble of genuine traits and adopted coping styles that do not reflect our true self at all but the loss of it. ~ Gabor Mate

We ignore the blackness of outer space and pay attention to the stars, especially if they seem to order themselves into constellations. "Common as the air" meant something worthless, but Hackworth knew that every breath of air that Fiona drew, lying in her little bed at night, just a silver flow in the moonlight, was used by her body to make skin and hair and bones. The air became Fiona, and deserving - no, demanding - of love. Ordering matter was the sole endeavor of Life, whether it was a jumble of self-replicating molecules in the primordial ocean, or a steam-powered English mill turning weeds into clothing, or Fiona lying in her bed turning air into Fiona. ~ Neal Stephenson

Jealousy - that jumble of secret worship and ostensible aversion. ~ Emile M. Cioran

Writing has been an important exercise to clarify what I believe, what I see, what I care about, what my deepest values are ... the process of converting a jumble of thoughts into coherent sentences makes you ask tougher questions. ~ Barack Obama

His laws changed all of physics and astronomy. His laws made it possible to calculate the mass of the sun and planets. The way it's done is immensely beautiful. If you know the orbital period of any planet, say, Jupiter or the Earth and you know its distance to the Sun; you can calculate the mass of the Sun. Doesn't this sound like magic?

We can carry this one step further - if you know the orbital period of one of Jupiter's bright moons, discovered by Galileo in 1609, and you know the distance between Jupiter and that moon, you can calculate the mass of Jupiter. Therefore, if you know the orbital period of the moon around the Earth (it's 27.32 days), and you know the mean distance between the Earth and the moon (it's about 200,039 miles), then you can calculate to a high degree of accuracy the mass of the Earth.

… But Newton's laws reach far beyond our solar system. They dictate and explain the motion of stars, binary stars, star clusters, galaxies and even clusters of galaxies. And Newton's laws deserve credit for the 20th century discovery of what we call dark matter.

His laws are beautiful. Breathtakingly simple and incredibly powerful at the same time. They explain so much and the range of phenomena they clarify is mind boggling. By bringing together the physics of motion, of interaction between objects and of planetary movements, Newton brought a new kind of order to astronomical measurements, showing how, what had been a jumble of con ~ Walter Lewin

Pushing through her own feeling of panic to find what Kane was trying to communicate to her. It was a bit of a jumble and she strained to make sense of it, finally grasping a repeated thread: I love you. Be ready. ~ Nicky Charles

Howard was almost as fond of this hall as he was of his own shop. The Brownies used it on Tuesdays, and the Women's Institute on Wednesdays. It had hosted jumble sales and Jubilee celebrations, wedding receptions and wakes, and it smelled of all of these things: of stale clothes and coffee urns, and the ghosts of home-baked cakes and meat salads; of dust and human bodies; but primarily of aged wood and stone. ~ J.K. Rowling

And the Internet was such a jumble of false and true factoids that no one believed what was on it any more, or else they believed all of it, which amounted to the same thing. ~ Margaret Atwood

I hold the door to the post office open for a weathered man in a wheelchair. He is gracious, thanking me. One leg is missing, and just as I notice this, I see the sticker on the back of his chair: VIETNAM VETS.

My thoughts jumble as an ache brews in my heart. I think of war and how it destroys, divides, and damages. I see the faces of those in the refugee camp and those who found their names on The List and are now in America. I want to tell this wounded soldier that I am sorry for his loss and for the abandonment he may have felt upon his return. I want to say other things, but right now I'm just honored to hold the door for him. ~ Alice J. Wisler

If a lunatic scribbles a jumble of mathematical symbols it does not follow that the writing means anything merely because to the inexpert eye it is indistinguishable from higher mathematics. ~ Eric Temple Bell

Summer in England THOSE WORDS ARE SUPPOSED TO CONJURE UP HALCYON SUNNY afternoons; the smell of new-mown hay, little old ladies on bicycles pedaling past the village green on their way to the church jumble sale, the vicar's tea party, the crunching sound of a fast-bowled cricket ball fracturing the batsman's skull, and so on. ~ Charles Stross

Morris tried to keep the books in some sort of order, but they always mixed themselves up. The tragedies needed cheering up and would visit with the comedies. The encyclopedias, weary of facts, would relax with the comic books and fictions. All in all it was an agreeable jumble. ~ William Joyce

Now whatever the origin of this apparently meaningless jumble of ideas may have been, it is really a perfect and very slightly allegorical expression of the actual present views we hold today. ~ Frederick Soddy

Hieroglyphics had covered the walls and pillars, and from some undetermined point below had come a voice that was not a voice; a chaotic sensation which only fancy could transmute into sound, but which he attempted to render by the almost unpronounceable jumble of letters, "Cthulhu fhtagn". ~ H.P. Lovecraft

It's like a jumble of huts in a jungle somewhere. I don't understand how you can live there. It's really, completely dead. Walk along the street, there's nothing moving. I've lived in small Spanish fishing villages which were literally sunny all day long everyday of the week, but they weren't as boring as Los Angeles. ~ Truman Capote

Spite is a little word, but it represents as strange a jumble of feelings and compound of discords, as any polysyllable in the language. ~ Charles Dickens

It was true that Odette played vilely, but often the most memorable impression of a piece of music is one that has arisen out of a jumble of wrong notes struck by unskilful fingers upon a tuneless piano. ~ Marcel Proust

Whether it's a pebble in a riverbed or a soaring mountain peak, I see everything in the world as the handiwork of the Lord. When I paint, I try to represent the beauty of God's creation in my art. Many modern painters see the world as a jumble of random lines and shapes with no divine beauty or order, and their works reflect their viewpoint. Because I see God's peacefulness, serenity, and contentment, I work to capture those feelings on the canvas. My vision of God defines my vision of the world. ~ Thomas Kinkade

I size him up. A pasty jumble of limbs in latex-tight sharkskin slacks with three inches of white socks showing at the ankles above two-tone patent leather, a jacket matching the slacks stretched over narrow shoulders and an embroidered cowboy shirt with silver caps on the points of the collar, a bolo tie featuring a cockroach frozen in amber snug around his throat. ~ Charlie Huston

The co-presence of mind and object simply is not sufficient for an apprehension or comprehension of any object. Before one can seize an object, one must be equipped with a whole mass of sensitivities, concepts, expectations, background assumptions. A layman looking at a car engine just sees a jumble of metal objects and wires; a person who knows about car engines can immediately identify the parts and see their interconnection. Countless similar examples can be invoked: the capacity to perceive depends on the possession of the appropriate concepts. ... And here's the rub: the concepts, the anticipatory classifications and interpretations, contain theories which a) had to be discovered and built up by a long process, and b) may yet in the future turn out to be false. So even the purest of hearts, free of inner deception, will not perceive and understand an object unless endowed with proper intellectual equipment. Perception is never, so to speak, the innocent encounter of a pure mind with a naked object, and therefore capable of serving as an untainted foundation for an edifice of knowledge; perception is the encounter with some given element, which cannot be seized or isolated in its purity, but depends on a corpus of knowledge acquired up to that time, but open to revision in the future. ~ Ernest Gellner

Love, marriage, divorce, infidelity ... life was the same here as anywhere else, wasn't? She realized now wrong she'd been; the pali wasn't a headstone and Kalaupapa wasn't a grave. It was a community like any other, bound by ties deeper than most, and people here went to their deaths as people did anywhere: with great reluctance, dragging the messy jumble of their lives behind them. ~ Alan Brennert

Luna's magic was infused in every bone, every tissue, every cell. Her mother's magic was more like a jumble of trinkets left in a basket after a long journey - bits and pieces knocking together. Still, Luna could feel her mother's magic - as well as her mother's longing and love - buzzing against her skin. It emboldened the power surging inside her, directing the swells of magic. Luna held her mother's hand a little bit tighter. ~ Kelly Barnhill

There was a rumor that Project 9 engineers had figured out a way to replace the random jumble of our nighttime dreaming with organized thinking and real-life problem solving. ~ Dave Eggers

Our visuals must represent the truth and decode the verbal jumble so these children can find the right direction. ~ Adele Devine

It came to me then, I am sure, for the first time, how promiscuous, how higgledy-piggledy was the whole of that jumble of mines and homes, collieries and potbanks, railway yards, canals, schools, forges and blast furnaces, churches, chapels, allotment hovels, a vast irregular agglomeration of ugly smoking accidents in which men lived as happy as frogs in a dustbin. Each thing jostled and damaged the other things about it, each thing ignored the other things about it; the smoke of the furnace defiled the potbank clay, the clatter of the railway deafened the worshipers in church, the public-house thrust corruption at the school doors, the dismal homes squeezed miserably amidst the monstrosities of industrialism, with an effect of groping imbecility. Humanity choked amidst its products, and all its energy went in increasing its disorder, like a blind stricken thing that struggles and sinks in a morass. ~ H.G.Wells

One can make a compound formation of events and of places in the same way as of people, provided always that the single events and localities have something in common which the latent dream emphasizes. It is a sort of new and fleeting concept of formation, with the common element as its kernel. This jumble of details that has been fused together regularly results in a vague indistinct picture, as though you had taken several pictures on the same film. ~ Sigmund Freud

Are broken windows a new decorating theme around here?" Archer asked, coming up behind Jenna and me and poking his head into the parlor.
"So it would seem," I said. I was still looking outside when a faint light appeared in the gloom. It took me a minute to realize that it was from Cal's cabin. Was someone out there? Was Cal out there?
But just as quickly as it had appeared, the light went out again. Frowning, I turned from the doorway, and I went to slip my arm through Archer's. Then I remembered what Nausicaa had said earlier. Now wasn't exactly the best time for PDA, probably.
The three of us trailed behind everyone else into the ballroom. Here, at least, things looked more or less the same. Of course, the ballroom had always been one of the more bizarre rooms at Hex Hall, so that didn't say much. Still, I was relieved to see the familiar jumble of tables and chairs and not, like, tree stumps or whatever. ~ Rachel Hawkins

A beautiful young clerk might flirt with him as he browsed, but she'd never see what I did. She'd see only his shiny shell, snapped shut to hide a jumble of secondhand parts, ticking not quite as they should, but ticking nonetheless. A bit rusty. A bit erratic, like my heartbeat in the moments before I press his buzzer. ~ Cara McKenna

Now that she had the diagnosis to explain her sense of reality, she sorted some of the chaotic jumble of thoughts and memories.

"I'd feel funny having 'daydreamed' my way through whole seasons," Jo said, "but then I'd hear someone say, 'Time flies,' or 'How did it get to be three o'clock already?' and I'd think that everyone was like me. ~ Joan Frances Casey

In the Queen's prayerbook, along with the
blood-stain, was also a lock of hair and a crumb of pastry; Orlando now
added to these keepsakes a flake of tobacco, and so, reading and smoking,
was moved by the humane jumble of them all
the hair, the pastry, the
blood-stain, the tobacco
to such a mood of contemplation as gave her a
reverent air suitable in the circumstances, though she had, it is said,
no traffic with the usual God. ~ Virginia Woolf

People will buy anything at jumble sales,' I said. 'At the Evacuated Children Charity Fair a woman bought a tree branch that had fallen on the table. ~ Connie Willis

If we are honest - and scientists have to be - we must admit that religion is a jumble of false assertions, with no basis in reality. ~ Paul Dirac

Truth needs meditative eyes. If you don't have meditative eyes, then the whole life is just dull dead facts, unrelated to each other, accidental, meaningless, a jumble, just a chance phenomenon. If you see the truth, everything falls into line, everything falls together in a harmony, everything starts having significance. ~ Rajneesh

Because if you don't know someone all that well, you react to their surface qualities, the superficial stereotypes-they throw off like sparks. But once you fight through the sparks and get to the person, you find just that, a person, a big jumble of likes, dislikes, fears, and desires. ~ Dorothy West

There should be more or less of a jumble in your head or on your note paper after the first time and even after the second. Much that you will think of in connection will come to nothing and be wasted. But some of it ought to go together under one idea. That idea is the thing to write on and write into the title at the head of your paper ... One idea and a few subordinate ideas - [the trick is] to have those happen to you as you read and catch them - not let them escape you ... The sidelong glance is what you depend on. You look at your author but you keep the tail of your eye on what is happening over and above your author in your own mind and nature. ~ Robert Frost

Sometimes I feel like one of those sliding tile puzzles. I just get so dang close to what I want to see in the mirror and who I want to be ... but then I have to completely jumble up the pieces to try to get even closer. ~ Erica Goros

Like I always say, there's no 'I' in team. There is a 'me', though, if you jumble it up. ~ David Shore

THE NOTE said the first clue was "in the big one." I looked at the jumble of letters that followed, and I saw no pattern. Not such a surprise, since I was missing the puzzle chromosome and couldn't do puzzles designed for nine-year-olds. ~ Janet Evanovich

Tulips, I thought, staring at the jumble of letters before me. Had the ancient Greeks known them under a different name, if they'd had tulips at all? The letter psi, in Greek, is shaped like a tulip. All of a sudden, in the dense alphabet forest of the page, little black tulips began to pop up in a quick, random pattern like falling raindrops. ~ Donna Tartt

Dresden: of all German cities, Smiley's favourite. He had loved its architecture, its odd jumble of medieval and classical buildings, sometimes reminiscent of Oxford, its cupolas, towers, and spires, its copper-green roofs shimmering under a hot sun. ~ John Le Carre

Rome is ... an impossible compounding of time, in which no century has respect for any other and all hit you in a jumble at every turn ... ~ Eleanor Clark

She brought over a freshly brewed cup of black orchid tea and sat across from me. The tea was especially fragrant. From that day on, it was my favorite. The scent reminded me of rainy days and libraries and a jumble of gardens where there were flowers in bloom. ~ Alice Hoffman

I wanted him to be a poet. I wanted him to adventure out into the world and learn its ways, not losing himself in the jumble of life but seeing it in the poet's eye, and withdrawing after in the library room where he could write his poems of revelation. He would tell what he had seen. He never wrote a word in his life. But he did see. ~ Josephine Humphreys

The experiences of other totalitarian dictatorships show that behind the centralized and hierarchical communication and decision-making structures, apparently so clearly ordered by way of Party or dictators' decrees, lurked considerably more complex processes and structures. Under National Socialism there was a polycratic jumble of competing institutions and organizations (Wehrmacht, economy, NSDAP, SS). It was characteristic of Hitler to go long periods of time without making any clear-cut decisions or to circumvent these decisions by building new institutions. The ~ Jens Gieseke

In essence, then, the common picture of economic thought after Smith needs to be reversed. In the conventional view, Adam Smith, the towering founder, by his theoretical genius and by the sheer weight of his knowledge of institutional facts, single-handedly created the discipline of political economy as well as the public policy of the free market, and did so out of a jumble of mercantilist fallacies and earlier absurd scholastic notions of a 'just price'. The real story is almost the opposite. Before Smith, centuries of scholastic analysis had developed an excellent value theory and monetary theory, along with corresponding free market and hard-money conclusions. Originally embedded among the scholastics in a systematic framework of property rights and contract law based on natural law theory, economic theory ~ Anonymous

Taqwaa (piety) is the driving force behind living faith. Without it, faith is only a meaningless jumble of memorized words and phrases, and 'righteous' deeds only shells of pretence and hypocrisy. ~ Abu Ameenah Bilal Philips

Our souls, that is our selves, are like a jumbled heap of pins: interests, thoughts, emotions, volitions, and feelings -- our life at work, our life of play, our domestic and social life, our life in the limelight, and our life alone -- all a heap of pins pointing in all directions and getting in one another's way. But the slow approach of a magnet sorts the jumble out in a remarkable way, confusion becomes a pattern, each pin points in the same direction, and all is achieved by the focus of magnetic power. It is superfluous to add that the only magnet which can sort out all the intricacies of the human soul is God. In short the state of perfect recollection is that most characteristic expression of the work of the Holy Ghost; the creation of order out of chaos. ~ Martin Thornton

An explanation." Sicarius regarded her intently. "Clarify the situation with the emperor. I could not understand the incoherent jumble you spit out before falling unconscious. ~ Lindsay Buroker

Life to most of us is just a jumble of sensations, like a very bad film with no plot, no real beginning and end. ~ Anthony Burgess

What would it be like when I was fifty, sixty, older? I'd be no more than a jumble of organs in slow decomposition. ~ Michel Houellebecq

I might've found a way to cure them." Crystal said in a jumble of words.
"Cure them? Permanently?"
"Yes sir."
He thought about this a moment before speaking, "You've got two weeks, can you do it by then?"
"That's plenty of time sir, thank you. ~ Julia Barkey

I cannot understand why we idle discussing religion. If we are honest - and scientists have to be - we must admit that religion is a jumble of false assertions, with no basis in reality. The very idea of God is a product of the human imagination. It is quite understandable why primitive people, who were so much more exposed to the overpowering forces of nature than we are today, should have personified these forces in fear and trembling. But nowadays, when we understand so many natural processes, we have no need for such solutions. I can't for the life of me see how the postulate of an Almighty God helps us in any way. What I do see is that this assumption leads to such unproductive questions as why God allows so much misery and injustice, the exploitation of the poor by the rich and all the other horrors He might have prevented. If religion is still being taught, it is by no means because its ideas still convince us, but simply because some of us want to keep the lower classes quiet. Quiet people are much easier to govern than clamorous and dissatisfied ones. They are also much easier to exploit. Religion is a kind of opium that allows a nation to lull itself into wishful dreams and so forget the injustices that are being perpetrated against the people. Hence the close alliance between those two great political forces, the State and the Church. Both need the illusion that a kindly God rewards - in heaven if not on earth - all those who have not risen up against injustice, wh ~ Paul A.M. Dirac

By focusing exclusively on the events of the day, journalism all but severs the connection between time and eternity. It makes the world appear to be nothing but an endless jumble of events through which it is difficult, if not impossible, to discern anything beyond the relatively base motivations of lust, calculated self-interest, and the will to power. In short, journalism is not able to communicate wisdom. ~ Craig M. Gay

I don't know where the shape of a poem comes from. I certainly don't impose it. I write out of a jumble of emotions and vague notions and scraps of knowledge. At some stage a form or, rather, a shape mysteriously emerges. ~ Michael Longley

We don't have to know,only to be:let go the jumble of worn words,reason and vanity. ~ Hilda Doolittle

If you have an orderly mind, you'll be a winner no matter where you end up. If your mind is a jumble of junk, you'll be a loser. It's as simple as that. ~ Jack Gantos

It is quite natural to think of the self as something concrete, but it is, in fact, nothing of the sort. Rather, it is an abstract product of our minds, a convenient concept or schema that enables us to relate our present self with our past, future, and conditional selves, and thereby to create an illusion of coherence and continuity from a big jumble of disparate experiences. Indeed, one could go so far as to argue that the self is nothing but the sum total of our ego defences, and that it is therefore tantamount to one gigantic ego defence, namely, the ego itself. The self is like a cracked mask that is in constant need of being pieced together. But behind the mask there is nobody at home. ~ Neel Burton

As for the doctor's mind, though intelligent and certainly well-meaning, it was a jumble of intellectual artifacts even more confusing than all the gadgets, appliances, and coneniences that filled the ship. These latter Shevek found entertaining; everything was so lavish, stylish, and inventive; but the furniture of Kimoe's intellect he did not find so comfortable. Kimoe's ideas never seemed to be able to go in a straight line; they had to walk around this and avoid that. There were walls around all his thoughts, and he seemed utterly unaware of them, though he was perpetually hiding behind them. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

The dead are silent, and objects, when they hold impressions, are quiet until you reach through them. But the touch of living is loud. Living people haven't been compiled, organized -which means they're a jumble of memory and thought and emotion, all tangled up and held at bay only by the silver band of my finger. The ring helps, but it can't block the noise, just the images ~ Victoria Schwab

Rollerball is an incoherent mess, a jumble of footage in search of plot, meaning, rhythm and sense. There are bright colors and quick movement on the screen, which we can watch as a visual pattern that, in entertainment value, falls somewhere between a kaleidoscope and a lava lamp. ~ Roger Ebert

Life's a jumble of farce and melodrama, the chaotic scribbling of a third-rate penny-a-liner. We mock it to keep from going mad--or at least to display our good taste. ~ Gary Inbinder

What we see may deceive us - the skin may be deceptive - but there has to be one truth, right? It can't all just be a jumble of perceptions. So what really exists out there, beyond what we can see? We're so dependent on the surfaces of what we see. But if we could see past the skin of this world ... ~ Ted Dekker

The machinery joining the vats was a nightmare jumble of pipes and flanges. Since you couldn't really hire a professional plumber to set up your deathtraps, some clever techie on Angus Caine's payroll must have done it himself with whatever parts he had on hand. ~ Craig Schaefer

Facing Riko like this went against everything his mother taught him. He'd been raised to run, to sacrifice everything and everyone to ensure his own survival. His mother had never given him ground to stand on. Maybe that was why he hadn't been strong enough to save her in the end. A jumble of lies had nothing to fight for. But Neil Josten was a Fox. Andrew called this home; Nicky called him family. Neil wasn't going to lose any of it. If two weeks with Riko was the price to keep his team safe, Neil would pay it. Somehow ~ Nora Sakavic

If we take the time to unravel the surreptitious fragments from the past that are veiled in the muddle and jumble of our memory, we may single out the essentials for the present that might be best shots for the future. (Never looking back again", ) ~ Erik Pevernagie

Men today were half-made, and women were half-made. Creatures that existed and functioned with certain regularity, but which ran off into a hopeless jumble of inconsequence.
Half-made, like insects that can run fast and be so busy and suddenly grow wings, but which are only winged grubs after all. A world of half-made creatures on two legs, eating food and degrading the one mystery left to them, sex. Spinning a great lot of words, burying themselves inside the cocoons of words and ideas that they spin round themselves, and inside the cocoons, mostly perishing inert and overwhelmed. ~ D.H. Lawrence

They talked in the way toddlers might throw playthings around the room. There was seldom any catching of an idea and sharing it. When the lunches were over, individual opinions lay scattered about in a delicious jumble only ever one layer deep. ~ Jonathan Renshaw

Pixie herself was too little to tell a proper story. She just said a whole jumble of stuff: 'Pixie did dancing, then Pixie did singing, then Pixie ate lots and lots of ice cream,' droning on and on about herself. 'Pixie did telling stories and she was boring,' said Baxter unkindly. ~ Jacqueline Wilson

If you are collector, let other people share your pride and joy. Don't sprinkle your collection out of sight in a meaningless jumble. Notice how groups of small objects, when they are well arranged, become important and effective. Remember that repetition is a form of emphasis. Collect what you will, but see to it that you arrange your hobby to its best advantage. ~ Dorothy Draper

I haven't got a clue what this lot's supposed to mean," he said, staring down at a long list of calculations. "You know," said Ron, whose hair was on end because of all the times he had run his fingers through it in frustration, "I think it's back to the old Divination standby." "What - make it up?" "Yeah," said Ron, sweeping the jumble of scrawled notes off the table, dipping his pen into some ink, and starting to write. "Next Monday," he said as he scribbled, "I am likely to develop a cough, owing to the unlucky conjunction of Mars and Jupiter." He looked up at Harry. "You know her - just put in loads of misery, she'll lap it up." "Right," said Harry, crumpling up his first attempt and lobbing it over the heads of a group of chattering first years into the fire. "Okay … on Monday, I will be in danger of - er - burns." "Yeah, you will be," said Ron darkly, "we're seeing the skrewts again on Monday. Okay, Tuesday, I'll … erm …" "Lose a treasured possession," said Harry, who was flicking through Unfogging the Future for ideas. "Good one," said Ron, copying it down. "Because of … erm … Mercury. Why don't you get stabbed in the back by someone you thought was a friend?" "Yeah … cool …" said Harry, scribbling it down, "because … Venus is in the twelfth house." "And on Wednesday, I think I'll come off worst in a fight." "Aaah, I was going to have a fight. Okay, I'll lose a bet." "Yeah, you'll be betting I'll win my fight. ~ J.K. Rowling

An open car drove by, fleeing into the country. The car was overfilled with people bound for a picnic. There was a jumble of bright sweaters, and scarfs fluttering in the wind; a jumble of voices shrieking without purpose over the roar of the motor, and overstressed hiccoughs of laughter; a girl sat sidewise, her legs flung over the side of the car; she wore a man's straw hat slipping down to her nose and she yanked savagely at the strings of a ukelele, ejecting raucous sounds, yelling 'Hey!' These people were enjoying a day of their existence; they were shrieking to the sky their release from the work and the burdens of the days behind them; they had worked and carried the burdens in order to reach a goal
and this was the goal. ~ Ayn Rand

People are so used to noise that they seem to be uncomfortable with the Silence, the stillness that is the undercurrent of all that is. As people gather, voices jumble together, one upon another, into a loud rumble. The energy of it may seem to be exhilarating. But in actuality it is depleting for it is stealing from them the opportunity to know their Core, the Pure Essence of their being. ~ Debra Clemente

Often the fairest impression that remains in our minds of a favourite air is one which has arisen out of a jumble of wrong notes struck by unskillful fingers upon a tuneless piano. ~ Marcel Proust

We do not converse. She visits me to talk. My task to murmur. She talks about her grandsons, her daughter who lives in Delphi, her sister or her husband - both gone - obscure friends - dead - obscurer aunts and uncles - lost - ancient neighbors, members of her church or of her clubs - passed or passing on; and in this way she brings the ends of her life together with a terrifying rush: she is a girl, a wife, a mother, widow, all at once. All at once - appalling - but I believe it; I wince in expectation of the clap. Her talk's a fence - shade drawn, window fastened, door that's locked - for no one dies taking tea in a kitchen; and as her years compress and begin to jumble, I really believe in the brevity of life; I sweat in my wonder; death is the dog down the street, the angry gander, bedroom spider, goblin who's come to get her; and it occurs to me that in my listening posture I'm the boy who suffered the winds of my grandfather with an exactly similar politeness, that I am, right now, all my ages, out in elbows, as angular as badly stacekd cards. Thus was I, when I loved you, every man I could be, youth and child - far from enough - and you, so strangely ambiguous a being, met me, h eart for spade, play after play, the whole run of our suits. ~ William H. Gass

A cool white, wintry light glazed the buildings on the highest hill: Will's memorial, the unsightly chimney from the hospital, the modernist cathedral in Clifton. The jumble of styles and eras lent the city the semblance of a medieval Roman town. Laura drove the long way round, up past the Clifton Suspension Bridge, strung like an a engineer's dream over a river sinking into the mud. Leigh Woods was on the far side, the trees dark, bereft of leaves, clawing at the sky. ~ Sanjida Kay

When first presented with the jumble of the periodic table, I scanned for mercury and couldn't find it. It is there - between gold, which is also dense and soft, and thallium, which is also poisonous. But the symbol for mercury, Hg, consists of two letters that don't even appear in its name. ~ Sam Kean

Could it be found, a single word for today and yesterday, with their jumble of indistinguishable, all too complicated colors, a word to embrace all the tomorrows? (O 1989: 229) ~ O Chonghui

In the ordinary jumble of my literary drawer, I sometimes find texts I wrote ten, fifteen, or even more years ago. And many of them seem to me written by a stranger: I simply do not recognize myself in them. There was a person who wrote them, and it was I. I experienced them, but it was in another life, from which I just woke up, as if from someone else's dream. ~ Fernando Pessoa

I didn't grow up feeling smart and special, the world my oyster, born with a silver shucker in my hand. No one works harder than you, that's the way Zell and Juwon liked to put it. Everything I have is because I was the dutiful worker bee or because I have no other things to distract me, like girlfriends or wives, like mewling kids or family dogs or a love of weekend brunches and fantasy football, or a single, sad hobby, like solitaire or the Sunday jumble. I have this. ~ Megan Abbott

My aim is to sort the jumble of information we throw at these children and present it in such a way that they will have a greater chance of achieving independence and fulfilment. ~ Adele Devine

You don't notice the dead leaving when they really choose to leave you. You're not meant to. At most you feel them as a whisper or the wave of a whisper undulating down. I would compare it to a woman in the back of a lecture hall or theater whom no one notices until she slips out.Then only those near the door themselves, like Grandma Lynn, notice; to the rest it is like an unexplained breeze in a closed room.
Grandma Lynn died several years later, but I have yet to see her here. I imagine her tying it on in her heaven, drinking mint juleps with Tennessee Williams and Dean Martin. She'll be here in her own sweet time, I'm sure.
If I'm to be honest with you, I still sneak away to watch my family sometimes. I can't help it, and sometimes they still think of me. They can't help it....
It was a suprise to everyone when Lindsey found out she was pregnant...My father dreamed that one day he might teach another child to love ships in bottles. He knew there would be both sadness and joy in it; that it would always hold an echo of me.
I would like to tell you that it is beautiful here, that I am, and you will one day be, forever safe. But this heaven is not about safety just as, in its graciousness, it isn't about gritty reality. We have fun.
We do things that leave humans stumped and grateful, like Buckley's garden coming up one year, all of its crazy jumble of plants blooming all at once. I did that for my mother who, having stayed, found herself facing the ~ Alice Sebold

It is an odd fact that certain words will leap at one out of a jumble of voices. Once such a thing is heard, the listener will naturally focus upon the conversation, and so hear everything that would have previously gone unnoticed. ~ Galen Beckett

Life is less clear to me every day. The world's harsh technicolor swirls jumble before my eyes until I'm dizzy. Amidst sheer chaos, you are my only black and white and nothing is more beautiful to me. ~ Green And Yellow