Non-Linearity Quotes

Going on means going far, going far means returning.

In politics the future is never a straight line projection of the present.

The future influences the present just as much as the past.

Life is not like water. Things in life don't necessarily flow over the shortest possible route.

As a former college president, I am well aware that every university is a complicated ecosystem, not a linear widget factory.

My mother was a restorer, she repaired broken things. I don't do that. I destroy things. I cannot go the straight line. I must destroy, rebuild, destroy again. My rhythm is not the same. My mother moved in a straight line: I go from one extreme to the other.

A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.

The important thing to remember is war does not progress linearly. The future course of events is going to be very difficult to predict with a high degree of precision.

Did you know that there are no straight lines in the universe? Life doesn't travel in perfectly straight lines. It moves more like a winding river. More often than not, you can only see to the next bend, and only when you reach that next turn can you see more.

If I have to have a past, then I prefer it to be multiple choice.

I am conscious of that when I make these games: I try to make a game that has beautiful open spaces, gaps, room for players to enjoy it in ways that were not authored. I never want it to be where you have to follow the rules completely, where you have to do things exactly as the designers intended.

Death is simply a break in our linear stream of consciousness.

It may happen that small differences in the initial conditions produce very great ones in the final phenomena. A small error in the former will produce an enormous error in the later. Prediction becomes impossible, and we have the fortuitous phenomena.

The straight line cannot proceed through the torturous twists of life.

There is no future. There is no past. Do you see? Time is simultaneous, an intricately structured jewel that humans insist on viewing one edge at a time, when the whole design is visible in every facet.

I'm always thinking about time. That's one of themes I return to in my work, the way the past bears on the present, the way that time is not linear, and how that expresses itself in people's everyday lives.

We [fiction writers] are much more of a maze than we are a motorway. Things are always in flux, they're always in movement, they're always twisting back on each other. I think the straight line is such a lie.

One thing is all things. To resolve one matter, one must resolve all matters. Changing one thing changes all things. Once I made the decision to sow rice in the fall, I found that I could also stop transplanting, and plowing, and applying chemical fertilizers, and preparing compost, and spraying pesticides.

The beauty of compounding iterative algorithms - evolution, fractals, organic growth, art - derives from their irreducibility.

Life doesn't move in a linear fashion. Life makes lefts and rights, and it doubles back.

Everything in nature is not just a straight up. It's an S-curve. It arises for a while until it hits some physical limitation, and then it plateaus again.

A formula can be very simple, and create a universe of bottomless complexity.

I love the idea of something beautiful happening, and then it being abrasively cut into. Because in a way it's similar to switching channels or surfing the web; I like people getting lulled into something and then taking them somewhere else.

Time is not a road - it is a room.

Scientists say every action initiates an equal and opposite reaction. I say that's just the start. I say every action initiates a most unequal and upredictable chain reaction, that every filament of living becomes part of a larger weave, while remaining identifiable. That every line of latitude requires several stripes of longitude to obtain meaning. That every universe is part of a bigger heaven, a heaven of rhythm and geometry, where a heartbeat is the apex of a triangle.