E. B. White Quotes

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

The words of the world want to make sentences.

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

I was born accidentally. I lived accidentally in London. We nearly migrated to New Zealand. So much of my life has been a product of chance, I can't see a meaning in it at all.

I guess my diction just isn't very good.

Life's single lesson: that there is more accident to it than a man can ever admit to in a lifetime and stay sane.

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.

Truly, it is a blessing and not a blasphemy when I teach that "above all things there stands the heaven of chance, the heaven of innocence, the heaven of accident, the heaven of wantonness".

All great work is preparing yourself for the accident to happen.

The world is so unpredictable. Things happen suddenly, unexpectedly. We want to feel we are in control of our own existence. In some ways we are, in some ways we're not. We are ruled by the forces of chance and coincidence.

Chance is a name for our ignorance.

You never know why something works or doesn't.

There is always room for coincidence.

Reading taught me how to write.

We are continually shaped by the forces of coincidence.

At its best, life is completely unpredictable.

Language is not only the vehicle of thought, it is a great and efficient instrument in thinking.

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?

My life is a series of things that just happen.

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

You never know what's going to happen and when it's going to happen.

The only sure thing about luck is that it will change.

In 1965, I was teaching a seminar on freedom when I told my students that the ultimate freedom lay in casting a dice to decide what to do. They were so shocked and fascinated that I knew I had to write the book.