Predictable Quotes

For most people, whenever possible, important habits should be scheduled for the morning. Mornings tend to unfold in a predictable way, and as the day goes on, more complications arise - ~ Gretchen Rubin

This is an example of what Jung called "the regressive restoration of the persona," namely, the re-identification with a former position, role, ideology because it offers a predictable content, security, and script. In the face of the new and uncertain, we often return to the old place, which is why we so often stop growing. (It has become clear to me, for example, that aging itself does not bring wisdom. It often brings regression to childishness, dependency, and bitterness over lost opportunities. ~ James Hollis

She smiled and squeezed his hand. "I swear I don't know what to do with you, Steele. You are forever keeping me off balance. Just about the time I think I have you figured out, you do something that completely changes everything." "Good," he said in a smug tone. "I'd hate to think I was becoming predictable. ~ Maya Banks

Every 20 minutes you've got to have a bump, you've got to have a change in course, you've got to unsettle the audience. It can't be too predictable so something has to happen. I think that was something that Hitchcock did very well too. You couldn't let an audience feel too settled in. ~ Barbara Broccoli

As soon as your mind knows that it's on and it's supposed to produce some lines, either it doesn't or it produces things that are very predictable. And that's why I say I'm not interested in writing something that I thought about. I'm interested in discovering where my mind wants to go, or what object it wants to pick up. ~ Paul Simon

The inaugural morning at Merston High was officially over. It was no longer a mysterious place in Melody's imagination, filled with endless possibilities and hooks on which to hang hopes for a better tomorrow. It was completely - boringly - normal. Like meeting an online crush after months of e-flirting, the reality didn't live up to the fantasy. It was dull, predictable, and way more attractive in the photos. ~ Lisi Harrison

Habits are funny things. What's funny, or rather tragic, is that bad habits are so predictable and avoidable. Despite this, there are people by the millions who insist on acquiring habits that are bad, expensive, and create problems. The habit they weren't going to get, got them! ~ Zig Ziglar

If you are working with a therapist counselor social worker grief expert minister priest or anyone else who is trying to help you navigate the wilderness of grief and they start talking about the groundbreaking observations of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross suggesting there is an orderly predictable unfolding of grief please please please. Do yourself a favor. Leave. People who are dying often experience five stages of grief: denial anger bargaining depression and acceptance. They are grieving their impending death. This is what Elizabeth Kubler Ross observed. People who are learning to live with the death of a beloved have a different process. It isn't the same. It isn't orderly. It isn't predictable. Grief is wild and messy and unpredictable ~ Tom Zuba

Stress can alter the expression of genes, which can affect the response to stress and so on. Human behavior is therefore unpredictable in the short term, but broadly predictable in the long term. ~ Matt Ridley

First of all, let's get one thing straight. Your Italy and our Italia are not the same thing. Italy is a soft drug peddled in predictable packages, such as hills in the sunset, olive groves, lemon trees, white wine, and raven-haired girls. Italia, on the other hand, is a maze. It's alluring, but complicated. It's the kind of place that can have you fuming and then purring in the space of a hundred meters, or in the course of ten minutes. Italy is the only workshop in the world that can turn out both Botticellis and Berlusconis. ~ Beppe Severgnini

I never want anything to be too predictable. ~ Mindy Grossman

It didn't take long for us to realize, though, that we hadn't eaten since the eggs twenty-four hours earlier. Eating was the one desire of the flesh we hadn't fulfilled.
I remembered seeing a McDonald's near the entrance of our hotel, and since I needed a little exercise I offered to dart out for some safe and predictable American food, which would tide us over till the dinner we had reservations for that night. Our blood sugar was too low to comb the city, looking for a place to have a quick lunch.
I knew Marlboro Man was a ketchup-only guy when it comes to burgers, and that's what I ordered when I approached the counter: "Hamburger, ketchup only, please."
"Sar…you only want kitchipinmite?" the innocent clerk replied.
"Excuse me?"
"Kitchipinmite?"
"Uh…pardon?"
"You jis want a hamburger with kitchipinmite?"
"Uh…what?" I had no idea what the poor girl was saying.
It took me about ten minutes to realize the poor Australian woman behind the counter was merely repeating and confirming my order: kitchip (ketchup) inmite (and meat). It was a traumatic ordering experience.
I returned to the hotel room, and Marlboro Man and I dug into our food like animals.
"This tastes a little funny," my new husband said.
I concurred. The mite was not right. It didn't taste like America. ~ Ree Drummond

I love you Aurora Eden you are so unpredictably predictable! ~ Lyn Gardner

Organisms are not billiard balls, propelled by simple and measurable external forces to predictable new positions on life's pool table. Sufficiently complex systems have greater richness. Organisms have a history that constrains their future in myriad, subtle ways. ~ Stephen Jay Gould

The Solent was one the worse stretches of sea in England; the current and tides were atrocious, but it was summer and this time the currents and tides were predictable. However, I did not know this; I picked a spot that I could see from the phone, where I would swim from. ~ Stephen Richards

History and societies do not crawl. They make jumps. They go from fracture to fracture, with a few vibrations in between. Yet we (and historians) like to believe in the predictable, small incremental progression. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I've always seen the world through the eyes of a scientist. I love the predictable outcomes that science gives us, the control over the world that that can render. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

Sufficiently simple natural structures are predictable but uncontrollable, whereas sufficiently complex symbolic descriptions are controllable but unpredictable. ~ Howard Pattee

Every time he came back, apologetic, contrite, he'd start off being real nice. But he was as predictable as rain. No body knew when he'd go off, but at some point everybody knew he would. ~ Chris Gardner

Writers should be orderly and predictable in their lives, so that they can be ferocious and sinister in their work. ~ Flaubert-G

Family caregiving has become a predictable crisis. Americans are living longer and longer but dying slower and slower. ~ Gail Sheehy

Science is about predictions based on predictable fact. Life is about surprises based on the unpredictable reality. ~ Ori Hofmekler

A boat, for all its complexity, is in fact a version of simplicity, but of a satisfyingly complex kind. Get to know the hundreds of ways in which a boat-at-sea works and you become its master and commander. A boat provides control in what looks like uncontrollable circumstances. It is the mirror image of the realities of life on land, which look easier but are, psychologically, far more difficult, more subtle, less visible, and less predictable. The boat, in other words, is the haven from the storms at home. And because a boat's workings are a mystery, in the old sense that it is an arcane art, with its own equipment and vocabulary, its nostrums and obscurities from which the vulgar are excluded, it is also a source of potency and seduction. ~ Adam Nicolson

Social media reactions to celebrity death have taken on a predictable pattern: an outpouring of shock with expressions of grief, followed by a ghoulish need to know all the details, to see the scene of the death and the family in mourning. Then a post-mortem dissection of all the perceived flaws the celebrity had. ~ Jennifer Armintrout

Memory is useful because it gives us a sense of continuity. But memory is also imprisoning because it conditions us in predictable ways. ~ Deepak Chopra

No, what Great Aunt Winifred was suffering from was the persecution every happily single woman suffers: the predictable social condemnation of her independence and childlessness. Dorothy reminded herself of what she'd learned during a university course on feminist history (with a strong Marxist slant): spinsters are a threat to patriarchy. ~ Tobsha Learner

Bureaucratic solutions to problems of practice will always fail because effective teaching is not routine, students are not passive, and questions of practice are not simple, predictable, or standardized. Consequently, instructional decisions cannot be formulated on high then packaged and handed down to teachers. ~ Linda Darling-Hammond

Jazz and poetry both involve a structure that may be familiar and to some extent predictable. And then, you try to create as much surprise and spontaneity and feeling and variation while respecting that structure. ~ Robert Pinsky

There was a reason for rituals. When you were lost in your own life, they provided a false structure, like paper walls for your house of cards, the illusion that things were predictable and safe sometimes the only thing that got you through. ~ J.R. Ward

Fortunately or unfortunately, the one predictable thing in any organization is the crisis. That always comes. That's when you do depend on the leader: The job of the leader is to build an organization that is battle-ready, that has high morale, that knows how to behave, that trusts itself, and where people trust one another. ~ Peter Drucker

When you become too predictable you lose your brand's luster. ~ Bernard Kelvin Clive

Her routine was as predictable as the rotation of the earth. ~ Viet Thanh Nguyen

Condom," she gasped.
A movement stopped.
"What?"
Phoebe felt the earth open up in preparation of swallowing her. How could she have not mentioned this before?
"I'm not on anything right now," she whispered. "Birth control. I'm not on the Pill." She gestured helplessly.
"Shit, fuck, damn."
Disappointment tied her in knots. "I was really only interested in that middle part," she joked.
There was a second of silence, followed by a low chuckle. "You're never predictable, Phoebe. I'll give you that. Cross your fingers."
"What?"
"Cross your fingers. I might have a condom in my shaving kit."
There was movement and rustling, then the sound of a zipper being opened.
"I'm going to have to put on the light."
She briefly debated being polite and closing her eyes, but who was she kidding? She wanted to see Zane naked. In preparation, she raised up on one elbow and stared in his general direction. When the light came on, she saw all she wanted and more.
He was kneeling at the end of the sleeping bag. Naked, aroused and more physically perfect than any man had a right to be. She saw the definition in his arms, the broad strength of his chest and his flat stomach before lowering her attention to his large, hard penis.
The physical proof of his desire for her made her so happy, she nearly cried. Her other instinct was to part her legs, tell him never mind with birth control and protection and demand he take her right there ~ Susan Mallery

The universe no longer seems to me a scene, at least in front of the great, blank curtain of the unknowable, filled by an orderly progress of more or less cognizable and predictable occurrences, depending upon interrelated causes; it seems the playground of the irresponsible, prankish, malevolent somethings, productive of incalculabilities. ~ Edward Lucas White

A disruption of the circadian cycle - the metabolic and glandular rhythms that are central to our workaday life - seems to be involved in many, if not most, cases of depression; this is why brutal insomnia so often occurs and is most likely why each day's pattern of distress exhibits fairly predictable alternating periods of intensity and relief. ~ William Styron

Over and over, we are broken on the shore of life. Our stubborn egos are knocked around, and our frightened hearts are broken open - not once, and not in predictable patterns, but in surprising ways and for as long as we live. ~ Elizabeth Lesser

Mrs. Heath wanted to sprinkle their minds with grass seed and watch the blades spike up through the earth, flat and predictable as a golf course. She wanted dependable students, well fed but not necessarily nourished. But he was not in that category. Admittedly, he could not count on his perceptions of letters and words, and he was not always accurate. He misused words most when he liked their sound. A sentence had a kind of music, and the word sounded right. The definitions were never as interesting as the sound they made coming out of your mouth. He rolled their flavors around on his tongue, tasting every nook and cranny, but he could not be trusted to deliver the right answer and she would never give him better than a C, no matter what genius work he produced. The way he saw it, his mind was a big unruly field of wildflowers. One day he would shower the world with blossoms. ~ Elizabeth Brundage

When the world is predictable you need smart people.
When the world is unpredictable you need adaptable people. ~ Henry Mintzberg

Over time I tried everything from "the good girl" with my "perform-perfect-please" routine, to clove-smoking poet, angry activist, corporate climber, and out-of-control party girl. At first glance these may seem like reasonable, if not predictable, developmental stages, but they were more than that for me. All of my stages were different suits of armor that kept me from becoming too engaged and too vulnerable. Each strategy was built on the same premise: Keep everyone at a safe distance and always have an exit strategy. ~ Brene Brown

I think that if we don't get these politicians to come together we face the most predictable economic crisis in history. ~ Erskine Bowles

Time limits tend to turn everything predictable and mundane into a novelty. ~ Rhian J. Martin

Arguments are often like melodramas - they have a predictable beginning, middle, and end. ~ Gay Hendricks

Romantic behavior was basically monotonous and predictable, and that therefore one could write a fairly straightforward formula that would predict the collision course of any two people. ~ John Green

I'd always hated the word realistic. Or, more truthfully, I'd always hated the way people used the word realistic - as if it were a limitation, as if reality were something that conformed so severely to likelihood that surprising things could never, ever happen. From what I'd seen, reality was much more complicated than that. Sometimes it was remarkably predictable, but a lot of the time it didn't go the way anybody would expect. I didn't believe in using probabilities to rule out possibilities. ~ David Levithan

Life isn't supposed to be predictable. ~ Eileen Cook

This is not my first road trip and it's not my first marriage either. I know that my hissy fit in Fougeres and our bad luck on the road to Bordeaux does not spell doom for either our love affair or our journey. Love affairs are like road trips, and road trips are like love affairs -- from beginning to end the emotions are equally intense, the phases just as predictable. Love and travel. They both have their ups and downs. ~ Vivian Swift

The sexual fantasies of masochistic women have another curious and, unfortunately, predictable element. They almost always focus on the woman imagining how she can make herself more desirable, more appealing to the man. She turns herself into a princess; she glorifies her appearance. Virtually never does she envisage what she would find desirable in a male partner. In her fantasies she attempts to idealize herself, but she tends to include the man pretty much as he is. ~ Natalie Shainess

Good cannot be a single and universal general notion; if it were, it would not be predictable in all the categories, but only in one. ~ Aristotle.

Hope drives us to invent new fixes for old messes, which in turn create ever more dangerous messes. Hope elects the politician with the biggest empty promise; and as any stockbroker or lottery seller knows, most of us will take a slim hope over prudent and predictable frugality. Hope, like greed, fuels the engine of capitalism. ~ Margaret Atwood

We tend to think of dangers and uncertainties as anomalies in the continuum of life, or irruptions of unpredictable forces into a largely predictable world. I suggest the contrary: that dangers and uncertainties are an inescapable dimension of life. In fact, as we shall come to understand, they make life matter. They define what it means to be human. ~ Arthur Kleinman

Scientists are the easiest to fool ... They think in straight, predictable, directable, and therefore misdirectable, lines. The only world they know is the one where everything has a logical explanation and things are what they appear to be. Children and conjurors-they terrify me. Scientists are no problem; against them I feel quite confident. ~ James P. Hogan

Oh Christ. Her words, come inside me, had a predictable impact on his dick. Fuck and double fuck. Reason was taking a fast exit stage left while his erection was taking the vertical route. ~ C.C. Gibbs

Where was the excitement it dependability? Where was the spontaneity in a predictable world? He could offer her an eternity of challenges and passion, of quiet, tender moments stolen in the depths of riotous flames and ravaging storms - tranquillity amidst the chaos. ~ A.G. Howard

Once we get predictable, we get vulnerable. ~ Deyth Banger

Unlike typical romantic comedies, Definitely Maybe is not formulaic or predictable and it spans a decade while being set against a political background. Also, the audience doesn't know who ends up with who until the very end, which makes it a sort of "romantic mystery comedy". ~ Isla Fisher

I think it's crazy for us to play games with our children's future. We know what's happening to the climate, we have a highly predictable set of consequences if we continue to pour greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. ~ William J. Clinton

After years of pretending at emotions, he'd grown to appreciate their mystery, their chaos and randomness. Sometimes they were predictable, one-dimensional, almost stupid - other times they were so confounding, complex, and exquisite that he was convinced humans really were as special as they thought themselves to be. ~ Kim White

Legitimacy is based on three things. First of all, the people who are asked to obey authority have to feel like they have a voice
that if they speak up, they will be heard. Second, the law has to be predictable. There has to be a reasonable expectation that the rules tomorrow are going to be roughly the same as the rules today. And third, the authority has to be fair. It can't treat one group differently from another. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

character strengths that matter so much to young people's success are not innate; they don't appear in us magically, as a result of good luck or good genes. And they are not simply a choice. They are rooted in brain chemistry, and they are molded, in measurable and predictable ways, by the environment in which children grow ~ Paul Tough

I've found that luck is quite predictable. If you want more luck, take more
chances, Be more active, Show up more often. ~ Brian Tracy

Postponing happiness until "all your ducks are in order" means never because life is not that clean, fair or predictable. It isn't what happens to you that defines your life, it is what you do with it that does. ~ Laura C. Schlessinger

For years, home has been idealised as a refuge from the world, somewhere predictable and unchanging. But home isn't just where we go to escape the world. Home is how we inhabit the world. Meaning comes from connection and a willingness to pay attention to the particulars of our lives, from the things we choose to use to our daily rituals and shared activities. ~ Louisa Thomsen Brits

Flash Floods are about as predictable as a crazy dream after one too many fish tacos - one minutes you're fine, and the next minute a moose is floating past you wearing a fishing hat and ladies' pajamas. ~ Doreen Cronin

If she's too predictable because you talk about the relationship all the time instead of going out and having one, he'll get bored quickly. ~ Sherry Argov

A world in which time is absolute is a world of consolation. For while the movements of people are unpredictable, the movement of time is predictable. While people can be doubted, time cannot be doubted. While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back. In the coffee houses, in the government buildings, in boats of Lake Geneva, people look at their watches and take refuge in time. Each person knows that somewhere is recorded the moment she was born, the moment she took her first step, the moment of her first passion, the moment she said goodbye to her parents. ~ Alan Lightman

All great tasks test our motivation. It's easy to court ideas over beers and change the world with napkin sketches, but like most things taken home from bars, new challenges arise the next day. It's in the morning light when work begins, and grand ideas (or barroom conquests) lose their luster. To do interesting things requires work and it's no surprise we abandon demanding passions for simpler, easier, more predictable things. ~ Scott Berkun

The moon: in that luminous face one can behold those tired phases that bring only disappointment and no satisfaction; the impulses governing its expression remain patternistic, its cycles of transition easily predictable. With moderated temperament it commands the capricious sea: its diametric opponent, in whose helpless defiance, arises an empty, albeit elegant promise, an ever-changing flicker of reflected light, a simultaneous opening and closing of paths to be traversed, a vacillating hope and disillusionment in whose unsettling direction emerges something one might wish to call, even under the hardened visage of sky, a marginal sense of freedom. To walk upon the decks of ramshackle vessels rising and descending in patterns indeterminate, to lean in ecstasy over their shaky rails to witness the splendor of that which transforms immediately upon being witnessed and which transforms thereby the witness in question: it was these flights of reverie that appealed better to one's imagination than the lean pragmatism of predictable transition. ~ Ashim Shanker

History, rather than following a predictable path from the past to the present, is like a meander: a twisting and turning stream shaped over time by a combination of obvious and imperceptible forces. ~ W. Bruce Fye

Others are to us like the characters in fiction, eternal and incorrigible; the surprises they give us turn out in the end to have been predictable and unexpected variations on the theme of being themselves. ~ Mary McCarthy

I had only one hard-and-fast rule: avoid interstates. They are predictable and boring, and their uniformity somehow erases changes in landscape; you can drive six hundred miles, from forests into desert, and feel that you haven't gone anywhere. In a sense, you haven't. You have no idea about the lives of the people in the towns and cities you've bypassed at seventy miles an hour. * ~ Philip Caputo

Life is predictable for it is based on fixed laws and principles. ~ Sunday Adelaja

I don't know when I started to realize that my country's past was incomprehensible and obscure to me, a real shadowy terrain, nor can I remember the precise moment when all that i'd believed so trustworthy and predictable - the place I'd grown up, whose language I speak and customs I know, the place whose past I was taught in school and in university, whose present I have become accustomed to interpreting and pretending I understand - began to turn into a place of shadows out of whcih jumped horrible creatures as soon as we dropped our guard. With time I have come to think that this is the true reason why writers write aboutn the places of childhood and adolescence and even their early touth: you don't write about what you know and understand, and much less do you write because you know and understand, but because you understand that all your knowledge and comprehension is false, a mirage and an illusion, so your books are not, could not be, more than elaborate displays of disorientation: extensive and multifarious declarations of preplexity. All that I thought was so clear, you then think, now turns out to be full of duplicities and hidden intentions, like a friend who betrays us. To that revelation, which is always annoying and often frankly painful, the writer responds in the only way one knows how: with a book. And that's how you try to mitigate your disconcertion, reduce the space between what you don't know and what can be known, and most of all resolve your profound di ~ Juan Gabriel Vasquez

That is just one more thing I love about cooking. Recipes are certain. Use good ingredients, follow the directions, be sure your oven temperature is true and monitor your stove properly, and you are assured success. There are not many variables once you understand how cooking works.
Life, on the other hand, is full of variables. Nothing is predictable. Not the weather, not other people, not traffic, not even our own bodies. We are like seaweed, whipped around in the current of an erratic ocean. ~ Beth Harbison

We are all far less rational in our decision-making than standard economic theory assumes. Our irrational behaviors are neither random nor senseless: they are systematic and predictable. We all make the same types of mistakes over and over, because of the basic wiring of our brains. ~ Dan Ariely

Guys are so predictable. They can't seem to separate fantasy from reality, so I get a lot of bikers and race car drivers hitting on me. They're all just playboys, so they don't interest me. ~ Michelle Rodriguez

Darkness doesn't fall at a predictable schedule. Darkness can overwhelm you any time of the day, as you know well. ~ Dean Koontz

Over the next eight years, almost without noticing, I arrived at a quiet revelation. You could make a home by yourself. You could fill that home with friends and friendly strangers without someone sleeping next to you. You could tend your garden and cook your meals and find predictable pleasure in your own autonomy. ~ Armistead Maupin

Hate. The word is thrown around as uselessly and as often as love is, and is used as a means in which to accuse and inflict damage; the weak-in-argument (weak in general) use it to discredit those with whom they disagree rather than dissect the issues for what they really are. I liken it to the predictable ad hominem attack, which is about as transparent as those who so ridiculously claim to know what's in the heart of another. ~ Donna Lynn Hope

Poetry is like walking along a little, tiny, narrow ridge up on a precipice. You never know the next step, whether there's going to be a plunge. I think poetry is dangerous. There's nothing mild and predictable about poetry. ~ Josephine Jacobsen

The Pathe & Mullen (1997) sample almost unanimously reported deterioration in mental and physical well-being as a consequence of the harassment. (..) These victims often described a preoccupation with their stalker, one commenting: "I think I've become as obsessed as the stalker himself". (..) Whenever stalking victims present it is essential to assess their suicide potential and continue to monitor this. (..) Victims of stalking often respond to cognitive-orientated psychological therapies because stalking breaches previously held assumptions about their safety. The belief of victims in their strength and resilience and their confidence in the reasonable and predictable nature of the world are frequently shattered, to be replaced with feelings of extreme vulnerability and an expectation of pervasive danger and unpredictable harm. Cognitive therapies attempt to restructure these morbid perceptions of the world that threaten the victim's adaptation and functioning. (..) Avoidance can respond to behavioural therapies such as prolonged exposure and stress inoculation, which aim to assist victims to gradually resume abandoned activities and manage the associated anxiety. ~ Julian Boon

A moth is such a simple machine in the animal world - the go-kart to the modern car - and it takes a lot of glitches to prevent it going. It's this intriguing simplicity, the idea that you could pull it into its constituent parts and put it back together in the same rainy day, that if you pulled back the skin, you could watch the inner workings, that makes a moth such an absorbing creature to study. Moths have a universal character: there are no individuals. Each reacts to a precise condition or stimulus in a predictable and replicable way. They are pre-programmed robots, unable to learn from experience. For instance, we know they will allways react to a smell, a pheromone or a particular spectrum of light in the same way. I can mimic the scent of a flower so that a moth will direct itself towards that scent ... ~ Poppy Adams

Far too often, people are woefully predictable. And I know many things. It's a curse. Here's something else I know: You are not doomed to be your parents. You can break the cycle. You can be whoever you want to be. But you will pay a price. You parents and everyone else will punish you if you choose to be you and not them. That's the price of your freedom. The cage is unlocked, but everyone is too scared to walk out because they whack you when you try, and they whack you hard. They want you to be scared, too. They want you to stay in the cage. But once you are a few steps beyond the trapdoor, they can't reach you anymore, so the whacking stops. That's another secret: They're too afraid to follow. They adore their own cages. ~ Matthew Quick

When reading a book, one hopes it doesn't turn into a painful process. Predictable is bad enough. Laborious is acceptable if the labor produces fruit. But with painfully bad writing, all one can do is grab a hatchet, slice off its head, and bury it. ~ Chila Woychik

Trying to order your world so that its predictable and safe is counterproducti ve to growth. ~ Mike Berry

Traumatic events challenge an individual's view of the world as a just, safe and predictable place. Traumas that are caused by human behavior. . . commonly have more psychological impact than those caused by nature. ~ American Psychological Association

Entrepreneurs don't believe the future is predictable - but they do believe that they can create the future themselves. ~ Max McKeown

Books were an antidepressant, a powerful SSRI. She'd always been one of those girls with socked feet tucked under her, her mouth slightly open in stunned, almost doped-up concentration. All written words danced in a chain for her, creating corresponding images as clear as the boy from Iran's bouncing family. She had learned to read before kindergarten, when she'd first suspected that her parents weren't all that interested in her. Then she'd kept going, plowing through children's books with their predictable anthropomorphism, heading eventually into the strange and beautiful formality of the nineteenth century, and pushing backward and forward into histories of bloody wars, into discussions of God and godlessness. What she responded to most powerfully, sometimes even physically, were novels. Once Greer read Anna Karenina for such a long, unbroken bout that her eyes grew strained and bloodshot, and she had to lie in bed with a washcloth over them as if she herself were a literary heroine from the past. Novels had accompanied her throughout her childhood, that period of protracted isolation, and they would probably do so during whatever lay ahead in adulthood. Regardless of how bad it got at Ryland, she knew that at least she would able to read there, because this was college, and reading was what you did. ~ Meg Wolitzer

You can concede to an opponent something he hasn't earned. It's one thing to underestimate an opponent. But maybe the worst thing is to overestimate. You always play your strengths. But that doesn't mean you become predictable. ~ Chuck Knox

At the risk of appearing predictable, the Bible was and remains the biggest influence on my thinking. I was raised reading it, memorizing passages from it and being guided by it. I still find it a source of wisdom, comfort and encouragement. ~ Hillary Clinton

At the quantum level our universe can be seen as an indeterminate place, predictable in a statistical way only when you employ large enough numbers. Between that universe and a relatively predictable one where the passage of a single planet can be timed to a picosecond, other forces come into play. For the in-between universe where we find our daily lives, that which you believe is a dominant force. Your beliefs order the unfolding of daily events. If enough of us believe, a new thing can be made to exist. Belief structure creates a filter through which chaos is sifted into order. ~ Frank Herbert

Hooks need to be predictable and not predictable at the same time. ~ Ken Hill

My work is just beginning. The easy part is over - the initial capture. It will be far more challenging from this point on. I need to set the stage for her to bond with her captor -- me. I know it will take time for her to accept her fate. In the coming weeks she'll move through predictable stages, much like the stages of grief: shock, anger, fear, even bargaining. Eventually, she'll realize that she depends on me – requires me -- for her day-to-day, most basic needs. Then will come the final stage, a coup de grace that is to be savored and celebrated: acceptance. Her will to survive will break down her resistance and bring her walls crashing down. That's my favorite part - the giving over of her will.
I straighten the cuffs on my tailored shirt as I peer through the door's window pane. It's interesting to watch her as she shuffles across the floor on her knees, blindfolded - the chains on her feet and wrists impede her attempts to move about freely. Her wrists are bruised and bloodied from her attempts to free herself, her vision hampered by a blindfold. And yet she fights. My brave girl. ~ Suzanne Steele

For this equality belongs to the post-Renaissance world of ideology-of political magic and the alchemical science" of politics. Envy is the basis of its broad appeal. And rampant envy, the besetting virus of modern society, is the most predictable result of insistence upon its realization. Furthermore, hue and cry over equality of opportunity and equal rights leads, a fortiori, to a final demand for equality of condition. Under its pressure self respect gives way in the large majority of men who have not reached the level of their expectation, who have no support from an inclusive identity, and who hunger for "revenge" on those who occupy a higher station and will (they expect) continue to enjoy that advantage. The end result is visible in the spiritual proletarians of the "lonely crowd." Bertrand de Jouvenel has described the process which produces such non-persons in his memorable study, On Power. They are the natural pawns of an impersonal and omnicompetent Leviathan. And to insure their docility such a state is certain to recruit a large "new class" of men, persons superior in "ability" and authority, both to their ostensible "masters" among the people and to such anachronisms as stand in their progressive way. Such is the evidence of the recent past and particularly of American history. Arrant individualism, fracturing and then destroying the hope of amity and confederation, the communal bond and the ancient vision of the good society as an extrapolation from family, is ~ M.E. Bradford

That's why people grow weary of listening to Dumpees obsess over their troubles: getting dumped is predictable, repetitive, and boring. They want to stay friends; they feel smothered; it's always them and it's never you; and afterward, you're devastated and their relieved; it's over for them and just starting for you. ~ John Green

In bullfighting there is a term called querencia. The querencia is the spot in the ring to which the bull returns. Each bull has a different querencia, but as the bullfight continues, and the animal becomes more threatened, it returns more and more often to his spot.As he returns to his querencia, he becomes more predictable. And so, in the end, the matador is able to kill the bull because in. ~ Carly Fiorina

While by definition, starship engine rooms should have been predictable, uneventful places that operated according to the reliable mathematics of warp physics, she'd come to believe that, more often than not, they were in fact the nexi of entropy. Order battled chaos in these places with an almost dependable regularity. And engineers, she secretly suspected, functioned as avatars of both these forces, keeping them carefully balanced so that neither overwhelmed the other. Thus, warp drive worked, but the best engineers could still find a new wrinkle in the laws of physics when circumstances required it. Bhatnagar ~ Robert Simpson

There is a neat economic explanation for the sexual division of labour in hunter-gatherers. In terms of nutrition, women generally collect dependable, staple carbohydrates whereas men fetch precious protein. Combine the two – predictable calories from women and occasional protein from men – and you get the best of both worlds. At the cost of some extra work, women get to eat some good protein without having to chase it; men get to know where the next meal is coming from if they fail to kill a deer. That very fact makes it easier for them to spend more time chasing deer and so makes it more likely they will catch one. Everybody gains – gains from trade. It is as if the species now has two brains and two stores of knowledge instead of one – a brain that learns about hunting and a brain that learns about gathering. ~ Matt Ridley

Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is esthetically boring - an anti-virtue in a field where we hope to be astonished and startled and at some deep level refreshed. ~ John Updike

One of the most predictable things in life is there will be change. You are better off if you can have a say in the change. But you are ignorant or naive if you don't think there will be change, whether you want it to or not. ~ Julius Erving

Where our enemies will strike us is predictable: it's where we least expect them to. ~ Nate Silver