Penelope Lively Quotes

Nothing is inevitable until it happens.

It seems to me that everything that happens to us is a disconcerting mix of choice and contingency.

I think things just happen to people. That's healthier, I feel, than believing there's some grand scheme where your story is already inscribed in the Book of Life. Books get rewritten.

The web of this world is woven of Necessity and Chance. Woe to him who has accustomed himself from his youth up to find something necessary in what is capricious, and who would ascribe something like reason to Chance and make a religion of surrendering to it.

We are continually shaped by the forces of coincidence.

Chance determines our lives in important ways.

My life is a series of things that just happen.

Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the fates.

A consistent soul believes in destiny, a capricious one in chance.

I say the one thing about luck is you can't really count on it.

The older you get, the more you realise how happenstance... has helped to determine your path through life.

I was born accidentally. I lived accidentally in London. We nearly migrated to New Zealand. So much of my life has been a product of chance, I can't see a meaning in it at all.

It is such a complex matter we live within, it is impossible to track logic and decision making really, so therefore each choice can actually only be seen as coincidence.

There's a lot of things in life that we don't know why they're coming exactly at this moment.

He [the historian] should recognize in the development of human destinies the play of the contingent and the unforeseen.

A man may plan as much as he wants to, but nothing of consequence is likely to come of it until the magician circumstance steps in and takes the matter off his hands.

Don't be surprised at Fortune's turns and twists: That wheel has spun a thousand yarns before.

Some things happen without you putting an effort, while some others things do not happen despite we wanting it to happen.

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

Chance is better than choice; it is more lordly. Chance is God, choice is man.

Chance is the fool's name for Fate

Making plans is a game. Life chooses for you.

I don't believe in fate, as in, which I - as a Catholic, I think, sort of predestination. But I certainly believe in chance.

I was not sure I wanted to issue orders to life; I rather liked the Greek notion of allowing Chance to take a formative hand in my affairs.

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