John Jeremiah Sullivan Quotes

I think that no relationship goes completely according to plan or the way you wished it had.

Great power is setting a goal, working hard for it, and achieving it in exactly the way you expected with no consequences and no remainders after the long division is done. But does that happen to anyone? The unexpected always hitches a ride along with everything you planned.

You think that your life is going to be one way, and then, for various reasons or whatever, it doesn't work out.

Sometimes in life, random things can blind-side you.

Nothing ever goes as planned in China.

There's many a slip 'twixt the cup and the lip.

Things aren't black and white in the world.

I don't know why, but life is usually more complicated than the plans that we make.

It's something you hope doesn't happen. When you sign on to do a job, you hope you'll be able to get it done. But that's not always in your control.

History does not repeat itself. Nor does it unfold in cycles. The real future is contingent, rich beyond imagining, a perennial gobsmack, tragic and glorious in equal measure; the pundits' future, spun of 'conventional wisdom,' is only a sucker punch to that common-sense fact.

The joys we expect are not so bright, nor the troubles so dark as we fancy they will be.

Human history is highly nonlinear and unpredictable.

That's my favorite kind of television, where it's not wrapped up in a pretty little bow. It's like life. You deal with one thing in your life, 500 others rear their head.

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.

History is totally unpredictable.

History proceeds in zig zags through crooked paths.

There is always something to upset the most careful of human calculations.

… experience should teach us that it is always the unexpected that does occur!

Historians emphasize contingency, complexity, and the unanticipated ... Few principles apply all the time.

The thing about the future is that it never feels the way we thought it would.

As far as I'm aware, you can't tell if something is going to be successful. Brilliant scripts often don't get picked up, and terrible ones do all the time!

Life is full of ironies and paradoxes.

People's lives often don't turn out as they expect.

In football, however well you think you are doing, however well your life is going, there is always a mugger there lurking in the shadows to bash you over the head when you least expect it.

Everything does not happen according to a plan, and you learn your lessons the hard way.