Laurie Colwin Quotes

I always leave room for serendipity and chance.

The greatest events occur without intention playing any part in them; chance makes good mistakes and undoes the most carefully planned undertaking. The world's greatest events are not produced, they happen.

Life is all about the unexpected.

No, I never planned my life.

Much in our lives is chance.

Be a football to Time and Chance, the more kicks, the better, so that you inspect the whole game and know its utmost law.

Everything's serendipitous and there's no way of knowing who's going to get sick or who's going to get hit by a bus or who's going to fall in love and who's going to get pregnant. All the things that happen, it's up for grabs so it's kind of an exercise in surrender in a way.

I think that's as far as you have to think, everything happens as a coincidence. It either happens or it doesn't. It's hard to map out a strategic plan by saying, 'If I do that, that's going to get me to the next level.' I think that's the wrong way to go into movies as an actor. It doesn't happen for me that way.

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.

At its best, life is completely unpredictable.

All of the very important events in my life happen by chance.

I like the accidental nature of being in the real world.

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.

Every individual decision is nothing but coincidence, every artistic decision is coincidence.

Every single moment is a coincidence.

No amount of thought can ever reveal what comes unexpectedly.

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

A very small cause which escapes our notice determines a considerable effect that we cannot fail to see, and then we say that the effect is due to chance.

I respond very easily to outside events. One's life is a matter of chance. Nothing that you've arranged for yourself works out.

What's crazy about my life is that the biggest things that have happened just happen.

You don't know what's gonna happen, so you can't really plan: you can only go with it.

Life was a swarm of accidents waiting in the treetops, descending upon any living thing that passed, ready to eat them alive. You swam in a river of chance and coincidence. You clung to the happiest accidents- the rest you let float by.

Life is a thing to be lived, not spent; to be faced, not ordered. Life is not a game of chess, the victory to the most knowing; it is a game of cards, one's hand by skill to be made the best of.

I was not sure I wanted to issue orders to life; I rather liked the Greek notion of allowing Chance to take a formative hand in my affairs.