Anna Quindlen Quotes

What people fear most about tragedy is its randomness - a taxi cab jumps the curb and hits a pedestrian, a gun misfires and kills a bystander. Better to have some rational cause and effect between incident and injury. And if cause and effect aren't possible, better that there at least be some reward for all the suffering.

My life is a bit unpredictable.

Life is a very scary thing because it's unknown. Anything can happen anytime, and that is terrifying for all of us: to not to be in control.

There are no guarantees in life. The simple twists of fate and the breaks of the game are the two maxims that define so much of the success and failure in life.

But as the unthought-on accident is guilty To what we wildly do, so we profess Ourselves to be the slaves of chance, and flies Of every wind that blows.

The world changed from having the determinism of a clock to having the contingency of a pinball machine.

I might have been born into a very literal sense of chaos, but in fact that state is true of all of us.

Life sometimes doesn't work out exactly as we plan or hope for.

Fate, or some mysterious force, can put the finger on you or me, for no good reason at all.

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

Things we do not expect, happen more frequently than we wish.

There's no 'Chutes and Ladders' in life.

There's many a slip 'twixt the cup and the lip.

There is always something to upset the most careful of human calculations.

Accidents rule men, not men accidents.

Luck is not scalable. Luck is not a national strategy.

Every time I try to plan something or assume that something's going to happen, it never works out like that.

Life can't be always be stable always right. There are things which are out of your control.

You can never control injuries. Accidents happen; that's just how things go.

Everything cannot go right all the time.

No matter how much you plan and prepare, things can still go wrong.

Success is a matter of luck. If you want proof, ask any failure.

Anything can happen. Anything happens all the time.

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

If destiny could bring two people together, then it could just as easily tear them apart, and, if it could tear two people apart, then it could just as easily bring them back together again. There was no beginning, middle and end to destiny. It wasn't neat and manageable. It was random and scary.