Fixed Action Patterns

Famous quotes containing the words fixed, action and/or patterns:

    Even an attorney of moderate talent can postpone doomsday year after year, for the system of appeals that pervades American jurisprudence amounts to a legalistic wheel of fortune, a game of chance, somewhat fixed in the favor of the criminal, that the participants play interminably.
    Truman Capote (1924–1984)

    The philosophy of action for action, power for the sake of power, had become an established orthodoxy. “Thou has conquered, O go-getting Babbitt.”
    Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)

    Phenomenal nature shadows him wherever he goes. Clouds in the staring sky transmit to one another, by means of slow signs, incredibly detailed information regarding him. His inmost thoughts are discussed at nightfall, in manual alphabet, by darkly gesticulating trees. Pebbles or stains or sunflecks form patterns representing in some awful way messages which he must intercept. Everything is a cipher and of everything he is the theme.
    Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)