Randall Jarrell Quotes

Things just happen. What the hell.

Freaky things happen all the time in the world. I suppose everything has to happen for the first time at some point.

Surprises can be compelling.

Life is what happens when you're doing other things, right?

In my wildest dreams I never thought - well, I never thought I'd work.

I never do research unless it's extraordinary circumstances.

Two years ago, if anyone had told me I'd be doing half the stuff I'm doing, I wouldn't have believed it.

We ... ought not to be rigidly bound by the rules laid down under circumstances so different for emergencies so utterly unanticipated.

Don’t ignore planning for unlikely events. Over long periods of time the highly improbable gets more probable to occur at least once.

It is useless to talk about Constitutional means for a condition of things never contemplated by any constitution.

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

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

I know, my dear Watson, that you share my love of all that is bizarre and outside the conventions and humdrum routine of daily life.

How else do you think life happens? A series of coincidences and occurrences have to happen somehow. Our lives all crash and collide and you think there's no reason or rhyme to it? If there wasn't any reason for it all, what would be the point? Why do you think anything happens at all? There is an outcome, repercussions and occurrences to everybody you meet and everything you say.

I had just come to accept that my life would be ordinary when extraordinary things began to happen. The first of these came as a terrible shock and, like anything that changes you forever, split my life into halves: Before and After.

Four years ago, who ever thought this would have happened?

Let not a god interfere unless where a god's assistance is necessary. [Adopt extreme measures only in extreme cases.]

People who think they know what is going to happen next are fools. Surprises - or what the brilliant author Nassim Taleb calls 'Black Swans' - are inevitable. Some are likely to be desperately unpleasant too

Coincidences, in general, are great stumbling blocks in the way of that class of thinkers who have been educated to know nothing of the theory of probabilities- that theory to which the most glorious objects of human research are indebted for the most glorious of illustration.

I had just come to accept that my life would be ordinary when extraordinary things began to happen.

A universe capable of giving birth to many such accidents is-- blind or not-- a good world to live in, a promising universe.

In considering irregular appearances, there are certain very natural mistakes which must be avoided.

I'm in the storytelling business, and so you're always drawn to the unusual. And early on, I discovered that's the easiest way to tell stories... If you come up through a newspaper as I did, your whole goal is to get a story on the front page, and you only get something on the front page if it's unusual.

Life is amazingly unpredictable; any 22-year-old who thinks they know where they will be in 10 years, much less in 30, is simply lacking imagination.

I guess a lot of things happen still.