Steven Wright Quotes

I came in with Halley's Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don't go out with Halley's Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: 'Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.'

I kind of think I'm going to live a long life as a punishment.

There's nothing more ironic or contradictory than life itself.

Why should I ask the wise men: Whence is my beginning? I am busy with the thought: Where will be my end?

There are good people who are dealt a bad hand by fate, and bad people who live long, comfortable, privileged lives. A small twist of fate can save or end a life; random chance is a permanent, powerful player in each of our lives, and in human history as well.

I'm sort of anti-Aristotelian. I want to get an entire life onstage while conveying a sense of how time feels, how unstoppable it is, and how we don't really know what's going on because as we're trying to weave, it's weaving us.

It is really strange how life works, isn't it?

We do not ask to be born; and we do not ask to die. But born we are and die we must. We come into existence and we pass out of existence. And in neither case does high-handed fate await our ratification of its decree.

I knew it. I knew it. Born in a hotel room - and God damn it - died in a hotel room.

Pictures pass me in long review,-- Marching columns of dead events. I was tender, and, often, true; Ever a prey to coincidence. Always knew I the consequence; Always saw what the end would be. We're as Nature has made us -- hence I loved them until they loved me.

A man crawls into a tomb to die. A boy crawls in to live. You think that's chance?

The gods give to mortals not everything at the same time.

Our hour is marked, and no one can claim a moment of life beyond what fate has predestined.

Unless you believe in reincarnation, this is your one shot.

Babies haven't any hair; Old men's heads are just as bare; between the cradle and the grave lie a haircut and a shave.

What is there astonishing in the death of a mortal? But we are grieved at his dying before his time. Are we sure that this was not his time? We do not know how to pick and choose what is good for our souls, or how to fix the limits of the life of man.

You get what anybody gets - you get a lifetime.

There is an odd synchronicity in the way parallel lives veer to touch one another, change direction, and then come close again and again until they connect and hold for whatever it was that fate intended to happen.

Letters crossing in the post, unfamiliar tunes heard three times in one day, the way that blows of fate descend upon the same bowed shoulders, and the beams of good fortune glow perpetually upon the blessed. Fairy tales, as I said, are lived out daily. There is far more going on in the world than we ever imagine.

Life consists of a long chain of coincidences.

They had parted as boys, and now life presented one of them with a fugitive and the other with a dying man. Both wondered whether this was due to the cards they'd been dealt or to the way they had played them.

No man dies before his hour. The time you leave behind was no more yours, than that which was before your birth, and concerneth you no more.