Molly Ivins Quotes

You know, in life there are only three or four fundamental decisions to make. The rest is just luck.

If you want guarantees in life, then you don't want life. You want rehearsals for a script that's already been written. Life by its nature cannot have guarantees, or its whole purpose is thwarted.

Making plans is a game. Life chooses for you.

Life is mere chance only when one allows it to be.

Chance is a name for our ignorance.

No trumpets sound when the important decisions of our life are made. Destiny is made known silently.

It is in your moments of decision that your destiny is shaped.

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?

I have always believed that all things depended upon Fortune, and nothing upon ourselves.

Can you make a mistake and miss your fate?

A consistent soul believes in destiny, a capricious one in chance.

It seems to me that everything that happens to us is a disconcerting mix of choice and contingency.

The choices that we make through our lives, the people who intersect us on our path kind of change what our fated destiny is. So some of us are lucky enough for the choices that we make to keep us on our path.

Destiny is not a matter of chance; it is a matter of choice.

I believe there's fate, and then you have personal choice. I believe we have the ability to change our fate.

As a person, I am totally obsessed with the choices and decisions we make in our lives and how they dictate the course of our lives. Seemingly random choices that we make end up defining everything.

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.

Fate does not seek our consent.

Direct interference in a person's life does not enter our scope of activity, nor, on the other, tralatitiously speaking, hand, is his destiny a chain of predeterminate links: some 'future' events may be linked to others, O.K., but all are chimeric, and every cause-and-effect sequence is always a hit-and-miss affair, even if the lunette has actually closed around your neck, and the cretinous crowd holds its breath.

Of course you have to believe in destiny; that everything is sheer chance is an intolerable notion.

Fate does not always seek our consent.

The life we receive is not always what we choose.

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.

I embarked on my life - I didn't do anything. I don't have an explanation.

I haven't any sort of plans for the future but I reckon things will work out in some manner.