Life's Randomness Quotes

The Ordinary Life: the misery seems planned, the happiness accidental.

What life gives us, good or bad, we seldom deserve.

The things that don't happen to us that we'll never know didn't happen to us. The nonstories. The extra minute to find the briefcase that makes you late to the spot where a tractor trailer mauled another car instead of yours. The woman you didn't meet because she couldn't get a taxi to the party you had to leave early from. All of life is a series of nonstories if you look at it that way. We just don't know what they are.

Life's generally artless ... but it does get these occasional hard-ons for plot. It connects things, nefariously, behind your back, and before you know it you're in the final act of a lousy movie.

The trouble with writing fiction is that it has to make sense, whereas real life doesn't.

With a lot of songs on this record, one verse doesn't relate to the next verse. I don't think that one day really relates to the next day in life.

I was born in the year the Titanic sank. The Titanic went down, and I came up. That tells you a little about the fairness of life.

A book sometimes seems to impose a through-line to life that real life doesn't actually have.

Sometimes in life, random things can blind-side you.

As regards plot I find real life no help at all. Real life seems to have no plots. And as I think a plot desirable and almost necessary, I have this extra grudge against life.

Fate is like a strange, unpopular restaurant filled with odd little waiters who bring you things you never asked for and don't always like.

It's just accidental, just temporary. Until the next accident sends me somewhere new. That's how life works.

Nobody plays this life with marked cards, so sometimes we win and sometimes we lose. Do not expect anything in return, do not expect your efforts to be appreciated, your genius to be discovered, your love to be understood.

An intelligent observation of the facts of human existence will reveal to shallow-minded folk who sneer at the use of coincidence in the arts of fiction and drama that life itself is little more than a series of coincidences.

Life, for the most part, inevitably becomes routine, the random confluence of timing and fortune that configures its components all but forgotten. But every so often, I catch a glimpse of my life out of the corner of my eye, and am rendered breathless by it.

Meditation on the chance which led to the meeting of my mother and father is even more salutary than meditation on death.