C.J. Box Quotes

All models are wrong, but some are useful.

All the world is made of music. We are all strings on a lyre. We resonate. We sing together.

One man gathers what another man spills

All models are approximations. Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful. However, the approximate nature of the model must always be borne in mind.

I hate love. Hate being in love. I never want it to happen to me again.

Statisticians, like artists, have the bad habit of falling in love with their models.

Remember that all models are wrong; the practical question is how wrong do they have to be to not be useful.

Gratitude is the ability to experience life as a gift. It liberates us from the prison of self-preoccupation.

With a hangover and with fear, it is difficult to put a helmet on your head.

The only way to know how a complex system will behave-after you modify it-is to modify it and see how it behaves.

Just as the ability to devise simple but evocative models is the signature of the great scientist so overelaboration and overparameterization is often the mark of mediocrity.

Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

Discovering the unexpected is more important than confirming the known.

The business of the statistician is to catalyze the scientific learning process.

To find out what happens to a system when you interfere with it you have to interfere with it (not just passively observe it).

The human mind is like Salome at the beginning of dance, hidden from the outside world by seven veils. Veils of reserve, shyness,fear.

The management system which makes only a pretense of valuing employee involvement and encouraging employee empowerment merely breeds cynicism.

Reject the tyranny of picked. Pick yourself.

Talking to a therapist, I thought, was like taking your clothes off and then taking your skin off, and then having the other person say, "Would you mind opening up your rib cage so that we can start?

the church should just stay out of people's pants.

Reading a novel, War and Peace for example, is no Catnap. Because a novel is so long, reading one is like being married forever to somebody nobody knows or cares about.

We love those whom we serve (p. 26)

If you didn't have me to rake you over the coals now and then, there wouldn't be any fire in your life at all.

believe that giving up is the same thing as being realistic.

Horror was rooted in sympathy . . . in understanding what it would be like to suffer the worst.

We have little choice but to move beyond quality and seek remarkable, connected, and new. Remarkable, as you've already figured out, demands initiative.

We lunched and dined in crowded restaurants. We were always alone.

Management must provide employees with tools that will enable them to do their jobs better, and with encouragement to use these tools. In particular, they must collect data.

I do like the research part of writing, I must admit.

As a reader, I'm often put off by authors and story-lines without families or children and all of the angst and joy they bring with them.

I am what you might call a rambling man, and America is my beat.

I should prefer that you do not mention my name at all in connection with this case, as I choose to be only associated with those crimes which present some difficulty in their solution.

If all of us in the world just shared love, just a little, charity foundations wouldn’t be needed.

We humans are such complicated and confused beings that we call the animals beasts.

If you want to get the best out of people, ask them for help rather than assigning them work.

And to my soul mate, who has been with me all along, but is absent from my side.

And to my soul mate, ” he raises his glass, “who has been with me all along, but is absent from my side.

He'd possessed all the key elements of a school shooter: hormones, misery, ammunition. People wondered how something like Columbine could happen. Jude wondered why it didn't happen more often.

Service is a promise that cannot be seen, touched, or felt through any of our external senses.

The game isn't big enough unless it scares you a little. Cmdr. William Riker

Relationships are not additive, but multiplicative because you connect with his/her childhood experiences, past relationships, thoughts on money and more.

What's a man worth without love ? $.89 worth of chemicals." Hawkeye Pierce

Why not live for the reaches of Heaven than strive for the depths of Hell? If in the end there is nothing- what have you lost but fear and anger and hate?

Do you really understand all this army stuff?It helps not to be too bright, sir.

There are two mistakes one can make along the road to truth.   Not going all the way, and not starting.”   Siddhrtha Gautama

Turns out all it takes to bring enemies to peace is a bigger enemy.

Identity was partly heritage, partly upbringing, but mostly the choices you make in life.”Patricia Briggs.

Seems like people always want to think they're doomed. It brings them some kind of black comfort, I guess.Nate

I studied how to use the clothes washer. The handy instructions on the lid helped

If I spelled out the Principles of FaithI would be barking on the moon.