Harry Chapin Quotes

Life doesn't move in a linear fashion. Life makes lefts and rights, and it doubles back.

Life is not what you expect: it is made up of the most unexpected twists and turns.

The straight line cannot proceed through the torturous twists of life.

Life has many twists and turns.

Sometimes life takes you on unexpected paths, and those paths aren't always in the same direction.

Life takes you down weird paths.

Life will take you in all kinds of unexpected directions and it certainly did with me.

I see the world in very fluid, contradictory, emerging, interconnected terms, and with that kind of circuitry I just don't feel the need to say what is going to happen or will not happen.

Somedays the line I walk turns out to be straight - Other days the line tends to deviate.

No story is a straight line. The geometry of a human life is too imperfect and complex, too distorted by the laughter of time and the bewildering intricacies of fate to admit the straight line into its system of laws.

We are an intelligent species caught in an historical process. No generation which proceeded us knew what was going on, and there is no reason to assume that we know what's going on or that the generation which follows us will know what's going on. And what kind of trip is it anyway to insist on knowing what's going on?

And that's how things are. A day is like a whole life. You start out doing one thing, but end up doing something else, plan to run an errand, but never get there. . . . And at the end of your life, your whole existence has the same haphazard quality, too. Your whole life has the same shape as a single day.

I know there is no straight road No straight road in this world Only a giant labyrinth Of intersecting crossroads

I do find a certain fascination with the unpredictable. The transitory years we wade through are what they are- what we make of them.

Life has very little even ground.

The only thing we know about the future is that it will be faster changing and more unpredictable than the present.

For something that is static, fixed, dead, there can be a way or a definite path; but not for anything that is moving and living.

Life is full of surprises, isn't it?

As for me, the grounds of my hope have always been that history is wilder than our imagination of it and that the unexpected shows up far more regularly than we ever dream.

We will have more crises and none of them will look like this because no two crises have anything in common except human nature.

There is much unexplained in the world. It behooves us to be wary at all times. Just when you think you've got the hang of it, along comes string theory, collateralized debt obligations or Björk's new album, and bam! You're as confused as you were when you first started.

Life is like an ever-shifting kaleidoscope - a slight change, and all patterns alter.

I kind of miss that "becoming" stage, as most times you really don't know what's around the corner. Now, of course, I've kind of knocked on the door and heard a muffled answer. Nevertheless, I still don't know what the voice is saying, or even what language it's in.

Chance. It weaves through our lives like a golden thread, sometimes knotting, tangling, and breaking along the way. Loose threads are left hanging, but the in and out, the back and forth continues, the weaving goes on. It doesn't stop.

If we get total certainty, we get … bored out of our minds. So, God, in Her infinite wisdom, gave us a second human need, which is uncertainty. We need variety. We need surprise.