Michael Ondaatje Quotes

I'm simply an accident. Why take it all so seriously?

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.

Man has to live with the body and soul which have fallen to him by chance.

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.

We are never really in control. We just think we are when things happen to be going our way.

If a man really has charge of his destiny at all, he should have something to say about getting born; and I only came through by a hair's-breadth. What had I to do with this momentous first step? In the language of the lawyer, I was not even a party of the second part.

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.

Everything that happened to me happened by mistake. I don't believe in fate. It's luck, timing and accident.

Discouragement seizes us only when we can no longer count on chance.

All thoughts emit a throw of dice

You are much more dependent on luck than you think. People say if you want to have a good relationship, you have to work at it. But you never hear it about anything you really like, about sailing or going to soccer games.

This is the central illusion in life: that randomness is a risk, that it is a bad thing.

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

But really, there are no coincidences. Coincidences are just other people's choices, plans you don't know about.

You can be careful as far as you can, but you never know when you're going to fall over and break your ankle. It's like when you drive a car, you don't think about crashing, do you?

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.

We cannot bear to regard ourselves simply as playthings of blind chance, we cannot admit to feeling ourselves abandoned.

We never choose anything at all. Things happen. Or not.

Everything that exists is born for no reason, carries on living through weakness, and dies by accident

Your choices are half chance, so are everybody else's.

In spite of all evidence that life is discontinuous, a valley of rifts, and that random chance plays a great part in our fates, we go on believing in the continuity of things, in causation and meaning. But we live on a broken mirror, and fresh cracks appear in its surface every day.

The histories of the lives and fortunes of men are full of instances of this nature,--where favorable times and lucky accidents have done for them, what wisdom or skill could not.

So much of life is happenstance. It makes me laugh when I go to a bookstore and see all those titles about controlling your life. You're lucky if you can control your bladder.

He would conclude that nothing was real except chance.

I think diseases have no eyes. They pick with a dizzy finger anyone, just anyone.