Anna Quindlen Quotes

Life was a swarm of accidents waiting in the treetops, descending upon any living thing that passed, ready to eat them alive. You swam in a river of chance and coincidence. You clung to the happiest accidents- the rest you let float by.

Life consists of a long chain of coincidences.

All of the very important events in my life happen by chance.

My life is studded with a series of coincidences.

Things happen in weird, serendipitous ways.

Our wisdom and deliberation for the most part follow the lead of chance.

Chance. Stupid, dumb, blind chance. Just a part of the strange mechanism of the world, with its fits and coughs and starts and random collisions.

That's the thing about destiny: It can't be predicted, and it's usually pretty odd.

Everything's serendipitous and there's no way of knowing who's going to get sick or who's going to get hit by a bus or who's going to fall in love and who's going to get pregnant. All the things that happen, it's up for grabs so it's kind of an exercise in surrender in a way.

I think that's as far as you have to think, everything happens as a coincidence. It either happens or it doesn't. It's hard to map out a strategic plan by saying, 'If I do that, that's going to get me to the next level.' I think that's the wrong way to go into movies as an actor. It doesn't happen for me that way.

My life is a big accident, so where I end up, I think it's all accidents.

I never dreamt that I would do all the things that I have done. But things just happened to me all the time.

So much of life, it seems to me, is determined by pure randomness.

I've never guided my life. I've just been whipped along by the waves I'm sitting in. I don't make plans at all. Plans are what make God laugh. You can make plans, you can make so many plans, but they never go right, do they?

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

My life is a series of things that just happen.

Much of what we do in life has a huge component of luck.

Why one man rather than another? It was odd. You find yourself involved with a fellow for life just because he was the one that you met when you were nineteen.

Why does anything ever happen? Some things happen and some don't.

My life has been a whole series of accidents, some of them happy, some not.

Coincidence is a recognized element in 'real life.' All of us have anecdotes about those times when, by the merest coincidence, we avoided some disaster or stumbled onto some wonderful experience.

We can sit around and go, okay, is there really a plan, does somebody really know what's happening, is it all planned out, because sometimes it just seems too remarkable to me the things that have happened to me.

Every single moment is a coincidence.

No amount of thought can ever reveal what comes unexpectedly.

Fortune brings in some boats that are not steered.