Fixed Action Patterns

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

    “The whole point about the true unconscious is that it is all the time moving forward, beyond the range of its own fixed laws or habits. It is no good trying to superimpose an ideal nature upon the unconscious.”
    —D.H. (David Herbert)

    “These people who are always briskly doing something and as busy as waltzing mice, they have little, sharp, staccato ideas.... But they have no slow, big ideas. And the fewer consoling, noble, shining, free, jovial, magnanimous ideas that come, the more nervously and desperately they rush and run from office to office and up and downstairs, thinking by action at last to make life have some warmth and meaning.”
    —Brenda Ueland (1891–1985)

    “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)