Robert Jordan quote: “Time to toss the dice”

“You could not predict what would happen in a single instance, a single throw of the dice, a single pitch in the seventh inning, a single toss of the coin. But you could predict three out of five, four out of ten, seven out of sixteen, and to that extent chance governed everyone, all the time. Just as surely as two equals two.”

Michael Crichton book Odds On

Odds On (1966)

“Although there are those among us now who have been granted the gift of being able to glimpse patterns of the future, probabilities tossed like dice on the uneven blanket of space and time, even these gifted ones know that no single future has been preordained for us or our posterity. Events are fluid. The future is like smoke from a burning forest, waiting for the wind of specific events and personal courage to blow the sparks and embers of reality this way or that.”

Dan Simmons book The Rise of Endymion

Source: The Rise of Endymion (1997), Chapter 25 (pp. 535-536)

“When torrential water tosses boulders, it is because of its momentum. When the strike of a hawk breaks the body of its prey, it is because of timing.”

Sun Tzu (-543–-495 BC) ancient Chinese military general, strategist and philosopher from the Zhou Dynasty

Source: The Art of War, Chapter V · Forces

“Poverty is uncomfortable, as I can testify; but nine times out of ten the best thing that can happen to a young man is to be tossed overboard and compelled to sink or swim for himself.”

James A. Garfield (1831–1881) American politician, 20th President of the United States (in office in 1881)

"Elements of Success", as published in President Garfield and education. Hiram college memorial (1882), compiled by B. A. Hinsdale, p. 331

“The fact that the mean recurrence time is infinite implies that the chance fluctuations in an individual prolonged coin-tossing game are far removed from the familiar pattern governed by the normal distribution.”

William Feller (1906–1970) Croatian-American mathematician

Source: An Introduction To Probability Theory And Its Applications (Third Edition), Chapter XIII, Recurrent Events. Renewal Theory. p. 314.

“From the time they turned one they were tossed from the balconies of the kitchens, first with life preserves so they would lose their fear of the water, and then without life preservers so they would lose their respect for death.”

Gabriel García Márquez book Living to Tell the Tale

Living to Tell the Tale (2002)

“There can be times at sea when a ship is tossed
by two different winds, one of which propels
it forward while the other one is crossed
or retrograde, and among the powerful swells
it turns and yaws as if the crew were lost.”

Ludovico Ariosto book Orlando Furioso

Come ne l'alto mar legno talora,
Che da duo venti sia percosso e vinto,
Ch'ora uno inanzi l'ha mandato, ed ora
Un altro al primo termine respinto,
E l'han girato da poppa e da prora.
Canto XXI, stanza 53 (tr. D. R. Slavitt)
Orlando Furioso (1532)

“Please, sit down," Sharon said with another hair toss. I made a mental note to practice doing that in a mirror the next time I saw one. it seemed a useful skill, right up there with roundhouse kicks.”

James Patterson (1947) American author

“Warning. It is usual to read into the law of large numbers things which it definitely does not imply. If Peter and Paul toss a perfect coin 10,000 times, it is customary to expect that Peter will be in the lead roughly half the time. This is not true. In a large number of different coin-tossing games it is reasonable to expect that any fixed moment heads will be in the lead in roughly half of all cases. But it is quiet likely that the player who ends at the winning side has been in the lead for practically the whole duration of the game. Thus, contrary to widespread belief, the time average for any individual game has nothing to do with the ensemble average at any given moment.”

William Feller (1906–1970) Croatian-American mathematician

Source: An Introduction To Probability Theory And Its Applications (Third Edition), Chapter VI, The Binomial And The Poisson Distributions, p. 152-153.

“To see strong acting like this is exhilarating. In a time of flashy directors who slice and dice their films in a dizzy editing rhythm, it is important to remember that films can look and listen and attentively sympathize with their characters. Directors grow great by subtracting, not adding, and Eastwood does nothing for show, everything for effect.”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Reviews, Four star reviews
Source: Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/mystic-river-2003 of Mystic River (8 October 2003)

“Time to toss the dice”

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