quotations about chaos
Pandemonium did not reign; it poured.
JOHN KENDRICK BANGS
From Pillar to Post
Our real discoveries come from chaos, from going to the place that looks wrong and stupid and foolish.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK
Invisible Monsters
Lo: thy dread empire, Chaos, is restored;
Light dies before thy uncreating word:
Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall;
And universal darkness buries all.
ALEXANDER POPE
The Dunciad
Chaos half-loosed cannot be long controlled; it is all or nothing.
DEAN KOONTZ
Odd Apocalypse
Order generally was a product of human activity. Chaos existed as a raw material from which to create order.
FRANK HERBERT
Chapterhouse: Dune
There are men who bloom in chaos. You call them heroes or villains, depending on which side wins the war, but until the battle call they are but normal men who long for action, who lust for the opportunity to throw off the routine of their normal lives like a cocoon and come into their own. They sense a destiny larger than themselves, but only when structures collapse around them do these men become warriors.
GUILLERMO DEL TORO & CHUCK HOGAN
The Fall
Every moment we teeter on chaos and oblivion.
CLIVE BARKER
attributed, The Writer's Guide to Beginnings
Chaos is rejecting all you have learned, Chaos is being yourself.
EMILE CIORAN
A Short History of Decay
It's all about finding the calm in the chaos.
DONNA KARAN
attributed, Now Is Your Chance
Let chaos storm!
Let cloud shapes swarm!
I wait for form.
ROBERT FROST
"V. Pertinax"
In the space between chaos and shape there was another chance.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
The World and Other Places
I built these wings
With broken things
Found strewn in me
My nemeses
Chaos reigns
TRIVIUM
"Chaos Reigns", In Waves
The world was void,
The populous and the powerful was a lump,
Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless--
A lump of death--a chaos of hard clay.
LORD BYRON
Darkness
Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos.
MARY SHELLEY
introduction, Frankenstein
Art ... is an attempt to bring order out of chaos.
STEPHEN SONDHEIM
interview, July 5, 2005
It turns out that an eerie type of chaos can lurk just behind a facade of order -- and yet, deep inside the chaos lurks an even eerier type of order.
DOUGLAS R. HOFSTADTER
Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern
Experts and specialists lead you quickly into chaos. They are a source of useless nit-picking, the ferocious quibble over a comma.
FRANK HERBERT
Children of Dune
Either we are adrift in chaos or we are individuals, created, loved, upheld and placed purposefully, exactly where we are.
ELISABETH ELLIOT
attributed, The New Rebellion Handbook
The emphasis on man as savage implies that chaos is the aboriginal foe which must be vanquished before the civilizing process can begin.
N. KATHERINE HAYLES
Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science
One man's idea of perfect order is another man's chaos.
DEAN KOONTZ
Dark Rivers of the Heart