"You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"I accept chaos, I'm not sure whether it accepts me."
— Bob Dylan

"Our real discoveries come from chaos, from going to the place that looks wrong and stupid and foolish."
— Chuck Palahniuk

"What we call chaos is just patterns we haven't recognized yet."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Survivor)

"It's a cruel and random world, but the chaos is all so beautiful."
— Hiromu Arakawa

"[Horror fiction] shows us that the control we believe we have is purely illusory, and that every moment we teeter on chaos and oblivion."
— Clive Barker

"In chaos, there is fertility."
— Anaïs Nin

"Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos."
— Mary Shelley

"I felt very still and empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo."
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)

"In the space between chaos and shape there was another chance."
— Jeanette Winterson (The World and Other Places: Stories)

""Let's just say that if complete and utter chaos were lightning, then he'd be the sort to stand on a hilltop in a thunderstorm wearing wet copper armor and shouting 'All Gods are bastards.'" p.7
"The Color of Magic"
"
— Terry Pratchett (Author)

"If chaos is a necessary step in the organization of one's universe, then I was well on my way."
— Wendelin Van Draanen (Flipped)

"It is cognition that is the fantasy.... Everything I tell you now is mere words. Arrange them and rearrange them as I might, I will never be able to explain to you the form of Will... My explanation would only show the correlation between myself and that Will by means of a correlation on the verbal level. The negation of cognition thus correlates to the negation of language. For when those two pillars of Western humanism, individual cognition and evolutionary continuity, lose their meaning, language loses meaning. Existence ceases for the individuum as we know it, and all becomes chaos. You cease to be a unique entity unto yourself, but exist simply as chaos. And not just the chaos that is you; your chaos is also my chaos. To wit, existence is communication, and communication, existence."
— Haruki Murakami (Murakami Omnibus: "A Wild Sheep Chase", "Dance Dance Dance")

"The poet knows that he speaks adequately, then, only when he speaks somewhat wildly."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson ("The Poet")

"Chaos is what we've lost touch with. This is why it is given a bad name. It is feared by the dominant archetype of our world, which is Ego, which clenches because its existance is defined in terms of control."
— Terence McKenna

"I believe in organized chaos. "
— Zunpip

"Human history, like all great movements, was cyclical, and returned to the point of beginning. The idea of indefinite progress in a right line was a chimera of the imagination, with no analogue in nature. The parabola of a comet was perhaps a yet better illustration of the career of humanity. Tending upward and sunward from the aphelion of barbarism, the race attained the perihelion of civilization only to plunge downward once more to its nether goal in the regions of chaos."
— Edward Bellamy (Looking Backward: 2000-1887)

"Men are strange... I think it has something to do with the hair on their chins."
— Robert Jordan Lord of Chaos

"I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos. The pictures they paint, the music they compose, the books they write, and the lives they lead. Of all these the richest in beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art."
— W. Somerset Maugham (The Painted Veil)

"Clouds out of control decoct anticipation. What use can any of us have for two moons? The miracle of order has run out and I am left in an unmiraculous city where anything may happen."
— Samuel R. Delany (Dhalgren)

"We grow in direct proportion to the amount of chaos we can sustain and dissipate"
— Ilya Prigogine (Order out of chaos: Man's new dialogue with nature)

"The amazing thing is that chaotic systems don't always stay chaotic," Ben said, leaning on the gate. "Sometimes they spontaneously reorganize themselves into an orderly structure."

"They suddenly become less chaotic?" I said, wishing that would happen at HiTek.

"No, that's the thing. They become more and more chaotic until they reach some sort of chaotic critical mass. When that happens, they spontaneously reorganize themselves at a higher equilibrium level. It's called self-organized criticality."
— Connie Willis (Bellwether)

"'They believed that prediction was just a function of keeping track of things. If you knew enough, you could predict anything. That's been cherished scientific belief since Newton.'
'And?'
'Chaos theory throws it right out the window.'"
— Michael Crichton (Jurassic Park)

"Thus is our treaty written; thus is agreement made. Thought is the arrow of time; memory never fades. What was asked is given; the price is paid."
— Robert Jordan (Lord of Chaos)

"The creative act is a letting down of the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended, and the attempt to bring out of it ideas.

It is the night sea journey, the lone fisherman on a tropical sea with his nets, and you let these nets down - sometimes, something tears through them that leaves them in shreds and you just row for shore, and put your head under your bed and pray.

At other times what slips through are the minutiae, the minnows of this ichthyological metaphor of idea chasing.
But, sometimes, you can actually bring home something that is food, food for the human community that we can sustain ourselves on and go forward."
— Terence McKenna

"It was lunar symbolism that enabled man to relate and connect such heterogeneous things as: birth, becoming, death, and ressurection; the waters, plants, woman, fecundity, and immortality; the cosmic darkness, prenatal existence, and life after death, followed by the rebirth of the lunar type ("light coming out of darkness"); weaving, the symbol of the "thread of life," fate, temporality, and death; and yet others. In general most of the ideas of cycle, dualism, polarity, opposition, conflict, but also of reconciliation of contraries, of coincidentia oppositorum, were either discovered or clarified by virtue of lunar symbolism. We may even speak of a metaphysics of the moon, in the sense of a consistent system of "truths" relating to the mode of being peculiar to living creatures, to everything in the cosmos that shares in life, that is, in becoming, growth and waning, death and ressurrection. "
— Mircea Eliade (The Sacred and The Profane: The Nature of Religion)

"There is nothing stable in the world; uproar's your only music. "
— John Keats

"There are people like Senhor José everywhere, who fill their time, or what they believe to be their spare time, by collecting stamps, coins, medals, vases, postcards, matchboxes, books, clocks, sport shirts, autographs, stones, clay figurines, empty beverage cans, little angels, cacti, opera programmes, lighters, pens, owls, music boxes, bottles, bonsai trees, paintings, mugs, pipes, glass obelisks, ceramic ducks, old toys, carnival masks, and they probably do so out of something that we might call metaphysical angst, perhaps because they cannot bear the idea of chaos being the one ruler of the universe, which is why, using their limited powers and with no divine help, they attempt to impose some order on the world, and for a short while they manage it, but only as long as they are there to defend their collection, because when the day comes when it must be dispersed, and that day always comes, either with their death or when the collector grows weary, everything goes back to its beginnings, everything returns to chaos."
— José Saramago (All the Names)

"One must be cold if one wishes to savor chaos.
"
— Ferdinand Hardekopf

"One person's data is another person's noise."
— K. C. Cole (The Universe and the Teacup)

"It is a mistake to consider any belief more liberated than another. It is the possibility of change which is important. Every new form of liberation is destined to eventually become another form of enslavement for most of its adherents. There is no freedom from duality on this plane of existence, but one may at least aspire to choice of duality."
— Peter J. Carroll (Liber Null & Psychonaut: An Introduction to Chaos Magic)

"Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man."
— Henry Adams (The Education of Henry Adams)

"The lions sing and the hills take flight. The moon by day, and the sun by night. Blind woman, deaf man, jackdaw fool. Let the Lord of Chaos rule."
— Robert Jordan Lord of Chaos

"The lions sing and the hills take flight. The moon by day, and the sun by night. Blind woman, deaf man, jackdaw fool. Let the Lord of Chaos rule."
— Robert Jordan