Prose is something that is persistent in staying in one place long enough to not only zero in on the dramatic effect of something that might have happened, or something that might have been seen, but also in watching how it played out and thinking about the cause and the effect.
Reality does not easily give up meaning; it’s the biographer’s job to clobber it into submission. You’re meant not only to tame it but to extract substance, to identify cause and axiomatic effect. You subsist on the tactical omissions, the hollow words, the oddly unconnected dots.
Artistic tricks divert from the effect that an artist endeavors to produce, and even excellent elements such as bullets, arrows, brackets, ornate initials, are at best superficial ornamentation unless logically employed.
Time has the same effect on the mind as on the face; the predominant passion and the strongest feature become more conspicuous from the others’ retiring.
Seeing your work in print is exciting, especially when you’re young. It’s that feeling that you have some effect on the world outside of your immediate neighbourhood.
When something startlingly new comes up, young people, especially, seize it. You can’t complain about that. I think its heyday has passed, but it’s had an effect and will continue to have an effect.
According to the Law of Cause and Effect, every effect must have a cause. In other words, everything that happens has a catalyst; everything that came into being has something that caused it. Things don’t just happen by themselves.
Suppose you like someone very much. Then, by a familiar halo effect, you will also be prone to believe many good things about that person – you will be biased in their favor. Most of us like ourselves very much, and that suffices to explain self-assessments that are biased in a particular direction.
Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents, which in prosperous circumstances would have lain dormant.
So, in effect, my first sale was actually two books.
The Taliban’s acts of cultural vandalism – the most infamous being the destruction of the giant Bamiyan Buddhas – had a devastating effect on Afghan culture and the artistic scene. The Taliban burned countless films, VCRs, music tapes, books, and paintings. They jailed filmmakers, musicians, painters, and sculptors.
Whether we appreciate it or not, we live out our lives surrounded by an intricate pattern of social connections… We’re all embedded in this network; it affects us profoundly and we may be unaware of its existence, of its effect on us.
Nuclear energy people perceive the greenhouse effect as a fresh wind blowing at their back.
Once Wall Street starts putting money into Bitcoin – we’re talking about hundreds of millions, billions of dollars moving in – it’s going to have a pretty dramatic effect on the price.
The doctor-patient relationship is critical to the placebo effect.
And it is crucial of course that chief constables are able to make decisions within their budgets about how they deploy their police officers to the greatest effect to ensure that they’re able to do the job that the public want them to do.
