Quotes About Happenstance

#1. There's so much happenstance, so many accidents - stumbling into something and finding it interesting and living with it over time and building on it. It's okay to work from doubt. You need to be willing to not know.

Ellen Gallagher

#2. The older you get, the more you realise how happenstance ... has helped to determine your path through life.

Rowan Atkinson

#3. I suppose, all told, I've done more good than evil in my life, but that's incidental, a product of happenstance and the bizarre caprices of the world.

David Brin

#4. Most writers are secretly worried that they're not really writers. That it's all been happenstance, something came together randomly, the letters came together, and they won't coalesce ever again.

Nicholson Baker

#5. We make choices but are constantly foiled by happenstance.

Penelope Lively

#6. Hey, this is weird. I ordered one frozen yogurt and they gave me two. You don't happen to like frozen yogurt do you? I love it! You're kidding! What a crazy, random happenstance!

Joss Whedon

#7. Try to be happy within the context of the life we are actually living. Happiness is not a situation to be longed for or a convergence of lucky happenstance. Through the power of our own minds, we can help ourselves.

Wayne Coyne

#8. Humans do not proceed in an orderly fashion from one scene to the next. Memory lies underneath happenstance; hope and dread sprawl on top. Our days and nights are their endless orgies.

Catherynne M Valente

#9. But then again, chance has nothing to do with it. Your two fates did not cross through mere happenstance. The two of you set foot in this world because you were meant to enter it. And now that you have entered it, like it or not, each of you will be assigned your proper role here.

Haruki Murakami

#10. So much of life is happenstance. It makes me laugh when I go to a bookstore and see all those titles about controlling your life. You're lucky if you can control your bladder.

Rita Mae Brown

#11. By the cold Darwinian logic of natural selection, evolution codifies happenstance into strategy.

David Quammen

#12. In that turbulent time, the happenstance First Lady, Betty Ford, was certain of one thing: she would not change. 'I've spent too many years as me,' she declared. 'I can't suddenly turn into a princess.

Bonnie Angelo

#13. Chromosomal dance oh, heavenly happenstance rare creation, you -Marcus (Poetry Spam #22)

Megan McCafferty

#14. Life is not a path of coincidence, happenstance, and luck, but rather an unexplainable, meticulously charted course for one to touch the lives of others and make a difference in the world. BARBARA DILLINHAM

Natasha Turner

#15. If we are merely a chance product of 'random happenstance' and nothing more, doesn't it strike you as a bit odd that we have the ability to contemplate the question of 'random happenstance' with such methodical complexity?

Craig D. Lounsbrough

#16. Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action

Ian Fleming

#17. Sometimes I remind myself that I almost skipped the party, that I almost went to a different college, that the whim of a minute could have changed everything and everyone. Our lives, so settled, so specific, are built on happenstance.

Anna Quindlen

#18. Mr Bond, they have a saying in Chicago: 'Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it's enemy action'.

Ian Fleming

#19. This so gnawed at him on some nights that he lay awake wondering just how many unknown and similarly inconsequential accidents and bits of happenstance were at this moment occurring or failing to occur in order to ensure he took his next breath, and the next.

Louise Erdrich

#20. Actually, I liked the fact that happenstance had brought him to the right place; it was comforting to know that that life would support us if only we were listening.

Neil Abramson

#21. People make decisions that may have one intent and yet are somehow perverted into something else. And sometimes it's because of design. Sometimes it's because of happenstance. But very often, it's mysterious to them.

Atom Egoyan

#22. Happenstance intersecting with received wisdom produces something entirely new and significant

William Boyd

#23. Sure, kid. Look, there's a very old saying in my family: 'Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is another wizard fucking with you.

Scott Lynch

#24. History is not happenstance: it is conspiratorial. Carefully planned and executed by people in power.

George Carlin

#25. Serendipity is nice, but hoping for luck and the magic of happenstance shouldn't be an excuse for a lack of proactivity. I had to learn for myself that waiting isn't a life plan.

Karen Finerman

#26. If something or someone is presented to us once, we will often dismiss it as being nothing more than happenstance. If that person or situation is presented twice, it is God slapping us in the face and telling us to pay attention. It is fate.

Scott Hildreth

#27. The effect hip-hop had on me was enormous. I was exposed to it by happenstance. My father worked at a radio station in New York called WKTU Disco 92. It was the first radio station in New York City to play disco in the late '70s.

Michael Rapaport

#28. See, the world is narrowing. We each live in a bubble of attitude. Everything tailored for us. No happenstance, only what I already am and know. At a certain point I find my shape is less here.' A palm flat on his chest.
'More out there.' Laying the palm on his keyboard.

Matthew Blakstad

#29. I simply can't look into the heavens on a crisp starry night and somehow bring myself to believe that the gaping expanse that engulfs the whole of me is the product of chance happenstance. And neither can I believe that the gaping expanse that rests within me is anything less.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

#30. Has all this suffering, this dying around us, a meaning? For, if not, then ultimately there is no meaning to survival; for a life whose meaning depends upon such a happenstance - as whether one escapes or not - ultimately would not be worth living at all.

Viktor E. Frankl

#31. I think of how life takes unexpected twists and turns, sometimes through sheer happenstance, sometimes through calculated decisions. In the end, it can all be called fate, but to me, it is more a matter of faith.

Emily Giffin

#32. It's luck that one thing works out and one doesn't, it's sort of happenstance.

Richard Linklater

#33. For as is often the happenstance with that which is precious and lost, when you find him again, he may well not be quite as you left him.

Cassandra Clare

#34. The designs of men are notoriously subservient to happenstance, hesitation, and haste; but

Amor Towles

#35. Accidents did not just happen. From time to time they were carefully plotted, calculated, and arranged to one's advantage-all, of course, under the cloak of happenstance.

Jodi Picoult

#36. Not only is it not remarkable to be a single woman, there's no stigma attached. You see more and more women choosing to be single as well as happenstance.

Pepper Schwartz

#37. All those wasted and squandered years when I did nothing but go around looking inside myself until I ended up alone even though I was surrounded by people. But I paid attention only to what was happenstance about them - not their true selves.

Sigrid Undset

#38. Events," I say to the Captain, "events control our lives, although we have no understanding of them nor do they have any motivation. Everything is blind chance, happenstance, occurrence; in an infinite universe anything can happen. After the fact we find reasons.

Barry N. Malzberg

#39. The logical side of our brain convinces us that these events are all merely coincidences. Pure happenstance. That, The Legend of John Titor, must be wild-eyed fiction. The mind cannot accept any other conclusion as rational. Keep

E.A. Blayre III

#40. The most powerful life is the most simple life. The most powerful life is the life that knows where it's going, that knows where the source of strength is; it is the life that stays free of clutter and happenstance and hurriedness.

Max Lucado

#41. Happenstance is the myth of the simple mind, for it is the deliberate genius of God that what appears entirely disjointed always reveals itself to be stunningly seamless. And it is in reflecting on such stunning ingenuity that our faith becomes seamless.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

#42. Once was happenstance, twice might be coincidence, but thrice or more indicated the actions of your enemies.

Robert Jordan

#43. I am placed in situations with opportunities in those situations that others are not. I don't believe that that is happenstance. I believe that there is a God that has a plan for me.

Ronald Perelman

#44. One of the underlying things I like to do in books, is just say, stop and look at this for a moment. Not that you've got to believe that Jesus was real, or not to believe in God, but the belief that it isn't just happenstance.

Dean Koontz

#45. If an essay has a 'motive,' it is linked more to happenstance and opportunity than to the driven will. A genuine essay is not a doctrinaire tract or a propaganda effort or a broadside.

Cynthia Ozick

#46. As my father wrote, one's courage, hope, and spirit can be severely tried by the happenstance of life. But as I learned on this Virginia mountain, so long as one never loses faith, it is impossible to ever truly be alone.

David Baldacci

#47. Obviously it was happenstance, but it did change my opinion of human nature. I now saw war as a constant, akin to wildfires. They break out unless you work actively to prevent them. It's an atavistic thing, buried deep in our DNA.

Richard Engel

#48. She thought of the boy's features as an exquisite distillation out of random patterns-endless queues of happenstance meeting at this nexus.

Frank Herbert

#49. Design is the application of intent - the opposite of happenstance, and an antidote to accident.

Robert L. Peters

#50. Anger at happenstance for its absurd timing. Anger at myself for being so angry. I hate being angry and every time I got this angry it made me more angry at the fact that I was so angry. I realized though that I couldn't really be mad at any of those things.

David Bowick

#51. My work is on the one hand laboured, and on the other completely happenstance and intuitive.

Ellen Gallagher

#52. Peace is not happenstance. It is a living fire that must be fed constantly. It must be tended to with vigilance, else it dies out.

Libba Bray

#53. I went to really good New York City public schools that had arts programs. So in junior high, I got into the drama department. From there, I went to a performing arts high school in New York City called Laguardia and I just kind of fell into the professional side by happenstance.

Merritt Wever

#54. It takes, unhappily, no more than a desk and writing supplies to turn any room into a confessional.

Thomas Pynchon

#55. You trip over a word while carrying
a tray of vocabulary out to the pool
only to discover that broken glass
is a good topic.

Billy Collins

#56. Innocence is the beginning of ignorance. Experience is the end of stupidity.

Michael Bassey Johnson

#57. The best luck always happens to people who don't need it.

Robert Penn Warren

#58. Fate' and 'coincidence' are the mythological derivatives authored by those who refuse to see a 'greater purpose', because such a conclusion would naturally suggest a 'Greater Being'.

Craig D. Lounsbrough