David Mitchell Quotes

Isn't it odd how the little things can change a man's entire life?

So much of life is luck. One day you make a right turn and get hit by a car. Turn left and you meet the love of your life. I think I made the correct turn.

Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.

Fortune, which has a great deal of power in other matters but especially in war, can bring about great changes in a situation through very slight forces.

What's crazy about my life is that the biggest things that have happened just happen.

Life is so largely controlled by chance that its conduct can be but a perpetual improvisation.

It is often spur-of-the-moment decisions, sometimes made by others, that can change our whole lives.

That power of the Gods which orders for the good things which are not uniform, and which happen contrary to expectation, is commonly called Fortune, and it is for this reason that the Goddess is especially worshipped in public by cities; for every city consists of elements which are not uniform.

Here's the thing about luck...you don't know if it's good or bad until you have some perspective.

I love to think about chance - about how one little overheard word, one pebble in a shoe, can change the universe.

Without Warning Sometimes you're traveling a highway, the only road you've ever known, and wham! A semi comes from nowhere and rolls right over you.

The nature of tragedy and accident is that we cannot predict.

There are things in this universe that we cannot control, and then there are the things we can. . . . Let fate, coincidence, and accident conspire; human beings must act on reason.

Coincidences, in general, are great stumbling blocks in the way of that class of thinkers who have been educated to know nothing of the theory of probabilities- that theory to which the most glorious objects of human research are indebted for the most glorious of illustration.

I had just come to accept that my life would be ordinary when extraordinary things began to happen.

Sometimes something catastrophic can occur in a split second that changes a person's life forever; other times one minor incident can lead to another and then another and another, eventually setting off just as big a change in a body's life.

From triumph to downfall there is but one step. I have noted that, in the most momentous occasions, mere nothings have always decided the outcome of the greatest events.

Both destiny's kisses and its dope-slaps illustrate an individual person's basic personal powerlessness over the really meaningful events in his life: i.e. almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of Psst that you usually can't even hear because you're in such a rush to or from something important you've tried to engineer.

Fortune's unjust; she ruins oft the brave, and him who should be victor, makes the slave.

After all, our lives are but a sequence of accidents - a clanking chain of chance events. A string of choices, casual or deliberate, which add up to that one big calamity we call life.

There are winds of destiny that blow when we least expect them. Sometimes they gust with the fury of a hurricane, sometimes they barely fan one’s cheek. But the winds cannot be denied, bringing as they often do a future that is impossible to ignore.

Anything can happen in one day.

Where destiny blunders, human prudence will not avail.

Ross was a firm believer that you could not force circumstance. You could buckle your seat belt, but still crash the car. You could throw yourself in front of an oncoming train, but somehow survive. You could wait for years to find a ghost, and then have one sneak up on you when you were too busy falling in love with a woman to pay attention. To that end, he made the conscious decision to stop waiting for Lia. When he least expected her, that was when she would show up.

It is likely that unlikely things should happen