Debbie Millman Quotes

What people call serendipity sometimes is just having your eyes open.

I thought I would reflect here on a theme most scientists enjoy recalling: the part luck played in their accomplishments.

Sometimes you find yourself digging around for something useful, and you don't necessarily know what it is until you find it. Sometimes it's a word from a book that you read every day.

Sometimes the best reading comes just by accident. Someone talks about a book, or you're just wandering the stacks in the library, and you find a book that you love.

Truth is something you stumble into when you think you're going someplace else.

Serendipity is when you find things you weren't looking for because finding what you are looking for is so damned difficult.

With books at least, the best experiences are not when you find what you were looking for, but when something quite different finds you, takes you by surprise, shifts your tastes to new territory.

At every crossroad, be prepared to bump into wonder.

I didn't know I was looking for anything until I saw you.

You look for one thing and you find another.

One aspect of serendipity to bear in mind is that you have to be looking for something in order to find something else.

I went to see 'Frozen' - appropriately, with my sister - and loved it, but never in a million years could I have imagined that I'd ever play Anna. I mean, what are the chances?

You know what the truth is? You don't find Bill Murray. Bill Murray finds you.

Honestly, Detroit really wasn't on my list. I really didn't look into it much until I sat down with my brother and looked at the roster. It was kind of a perfect fit.

Pleasure to me is wonder—the unexplored, the unexpected, the thing that is hidden and the changeless thing that lurks behind superficial mutability.

Now everything is available at the push of a button, and that thrill of the search is gone. With vinyl albums and special edition releases, I feel like that's coming back.

Sometimes when you find something you didn't really realize you were looking for, you just don't know how to react.

You can not plan to make a discovery. You do not plan innovation.

Chance... in the accommodation peculiar to sensorimotor intelligence, plays the same role as in scientific discovery. It is only useful to the genius and its revelations remain meaningless to the unskilled.

Real travel requires a maximum of unscheduled wandering, for there is no other way of discovering surprises and marvels, which, as I see it, is the only good reason for not staying at home.

There are only two good outcomes for a quest like this, the hope of the serendipitous savant — sail for Asia and stumble on America — and the hope of scarecrows and tin men: that you find out you had the thing you sought all along.

It's a funny thing about looking for things. If you hunt for a needle in a haystack you don't find it. If you don't give a darn whether you ever see the needle or not it runs into you the first time you lean against the stack.

You always find things you didn't know you were going to say, and that is the adventure.

Nothing works until it does. Nobody knows anything. You don't know what people are going to respond to. People are always surprised by stuff.

The thing with your heart's desire is that your heart doesn't even know what it desires until it turns up. Like a tie at a tag sale, some perfect thing in a crate of nothing, you were just there, uninvited, and now suddenly the party was over and you were all I wanted. I hadn't even been looking, not for you, and now you were my heart's desire.