Cheryl Strayed Quotes

To talk of luck and chance only shows how little we really know of the laws which govern cause and effect.

You never know why something works or doesn't.

Chance is a word void of sense; nothing can exist without a cause.

There is no such thing as chance or accident; the words merely signify our ignorance of some real and immediate cause.

I also don't believe that "everything happens for a reason," which is in a similar category of world-views.

Most of the time-- 99 percent of the time-- you just don't know how and why the threads are looped together, and that's okay. Do a good thing and something bad happens. Do a bad thing and something good happens. Do nothing and everything explodes.

When we think about the present, we veer wildly between the belief in chance and the evidence in favour of determinism. When we think about the past, however, it seems obvious that everything happened in the way that it was intended.

Tho' there be no such Thing as Chance in the World; our Ignorance of the real Ccause of any Event has the same Influence on the Understanding, and begets a like Species of Belief or Opinion.

It doesn't matter how anything happens.

The world changed from having the determinism of a clock to having the contingency of a pinball machine.

Why does anything ever happen? Some things happen and some don't.

I don't believe in providence and fate, as a technologist I am used to reckoning with the formulae of probability.

Nothing is inevitable until it happens.

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.

The transition from cause to effect, from event to event, is often carried on by secret steps, which our foresight cannot divine, and our sagacity is unable to trace.

History is totally unpredictable.

Nothing ever happens till it happens.

Life is a school of probability

How fragile and unpredictable the course of history is.

Events are as much the parents of the future as they were the children of the past.

Cause and effect are two sides of one fact.

You can't really explain why things happen.

There are no logical answers in football. That's just the way it goes.

Things don't happen for no reason.

There's no way to know what makes one thing happen and not another. What leads to what. What destroys what. What causes what to flourish or die or take another course. But I was pretty certain as I sat there that tonight that if it hadn't been for Eddie, I wouldn't have found myself on the PCT. And though it was true that everything I felt for him sat like a boulder in my throat, this realization made the boulder sit ever so much lighter. He hadn't loved me well in the end, but he'd loved me well when it mattered.