Susan Glaspell Quotes

In every one of my scientific expeditions, the most significant findings were things I didn’t expect and was not originally what we were studying.

Life is too mysterious to try to map it out. I've certainly lived long enough to know it will take you places you never thought it would take you - and some of those places are kind of wonderful.

I never have taken a picture I've intended. They're always better or worse.

We can never fully plan our future, so don't try.

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.

Many of the world's greatest discoveries have been by accident. I mean, look at the Reese's Peanut Butter Cup, or Botox.

The literature of science is filled with answers found when the question propounded had an entirely different direction and end.

We carry around in our heads these pictures of what our lives are supposed to look like, painted by the brush of out intentions. It's the great, deep secret of humanity that in the end none of our lives look the way we thought they would. As much as we wish to believe otherwise, most of life is a reaction to circumstances.

The most important things in your life are almost always impossible to predict.

Once you’ve lived a little you will find that whatever you send out into the world comes back to you in one way or another. It may be today, tomorrow, or years from now, but it happens; usually when you least expect it, usually in a form that’s pretty different from the original. Those coincidental moments that change your life seem random at the time but I don’t think they are. At least that’s how it’s worked out in my life. And I know I’m not the only one.

Maybe all wondrous books appear in our lives the way Milo’s tollbooth appears, an inexplicable gift, cast up by some curious chance that comes to feel, after we have finished and fallen in love with the book, like the workings of a secret purpose. Of all the enchantments of beloved books the most mysterious-the most phantasmal-is the way they always seem to come our way precisely when we need them.

That's why I write, because life never works except in retrospect. You can't control life, at least you can control your version.

Because you don’t ever find things when you’re looking for them. You find them when you’re not.” “If that were true, nobody would ever find their keys.

It's a funny old world. A man's lucky if he gets out of it alive.

...maximize the serendipity around you.

Sometimes miracles occur only when you jump in.

Chance often gives us that which we should not have presumed to ask.

How complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is.

Adult life is dealing with an enormous amount of questions that don't have answers.

I'm not sure anyone's life turns out exactly the way they imagine. All we can do is to try to make the best of it. Even when it seems impossible.

We all carry around so much pain in our hearts. Love and pain and beauty. They all seem to go together like one little tidy confusing package. It's a messy business, life. It's hard to figure - full of surprises. Some good. Some bad.

The point is to stumble upon things in your life, and not plan them out.

faith is like love; when you want it you can't find it, and you find it when you least expect it.

Some luck lies in not getting what you thought you wanted but getting what you have.

What I really hoped for, no doubt, was to come upon one of those lives which begin nowhere, which lead us through marshes and salt flats, trickling away, seemingly without plan, purpose or goal, and suddenly emerge, gushing like geysers, and never cease gushing, even in death.