Joseph Heller Quotes

I did not direct my life. I didn't design it. I never made decisions. Things always came up and made them for me. That's what life is.

Fate is not in man but around him

The ways in which we are able to express courage also depend on the hand life deals us.

My hand has become the obedient instrument of a remote will.

I think half of our life is written out for us and things happen the way their supposed to happen.

I don't know whether the bird you are holding is dead or alive, but what I do know is that it is in your hands. It is in your hands.

Things happen the way they happen because the world is the way it is.

It's strange, I think, the way our lives turn out. Moments of circumstance, when later combined with conscious decisions and actions and a boatload of hope, can eventually forge a future that seems predestined.

Life just happens the way it's supposed to happen. It delivers you to where it delivers you.

I never used to believe in fate. I used to think you make your own life, and then you call it fate.

Sometimes, it seems like the whole world has already set my life out for me.

Things work out the way they're meant to

Timing was everything when it came to being a woman—the moment you entered the world could seal your fate.

It's hard sometimes to remember why we do anything in the first place. It's nice to think there's a purpose, or even a real decision that turns everything in one direction, but that's not always true, is it? We just fall into our lives.

You never want to be forced to do something. But the world around you starts to influence you in ways you never expected.

How can the life of such a man be in the palm of some fools hand?

The threads of circumstance that lead to tomorrow are so tenuous that all the fussing and worrying about decisions is futile compared to the pure randomness of existence.

We often regret we did not do otherwise, when that very otherwise would, in all probability, have done for us.

There were endless ways to spend your days, I knew that, none of them right or wrong. But given the chance for a real do-over, another way around, who would say no?

Luck is luck ... What we do with it determines whether it's good or bad.

I know one thing for certain; it is much harder to tell whether you are lost than whether you were lost, for, on many occasions, where you are going is exactly where you are. On the other hand, if you often find that where you've been is not at all where you should have gone, and, since it's much more difficult to find your way back from someplace you've never left, I suggest you go there immediately and then decide.

Opportunities and choices. When a person makes a heart wish, that wish resonates through the currents and things will happen to give the person an opportunity to make the wish come true. Like a hand offered and accepted.

I got here the same way the coin did.

If we can accept whatever hand we've been dealt - no matter how unwelcome - the way to proceed eventually becomes clear.

To fate and the strange way that it twists us all together.