Unexpected Turns Quotes

In general, lives seem to veer abruptly from one thing to another, to jostle and bump, to squirm. A person heads in one direction, turns sharply in mid-course, stalls, drifts, starts up again. Nothing is ever known, and inevitably we come to a place quite different from the one we set out for.

Much of the time in the writer's room is spent working on story, and I was always challenging myself to make it more interesting, tighter and more surprising: to come at it sideways in a way that the audience wasn't expecting.

Life sometimes doesn't work out exactly as we plan or hope for.

Life is not a straight line leading from one blessing to the next and then finally to heaven. Life is a winding and troubled road. Switchback after switchback. And the point of biblical stories like Joseph and Job and Esther and Ruth is to help us feel in our bones (not just know in our heads) that God is for us in all these strange turns. God is not just showing up after the trouble and cleaning it up. He is plotting the course and managing the troubles with far-reaching purposes for our good and for the glory of Jesus Christ.

I'm never going to rule anything out in life, because most of what I'm doing now, I never intended to do.

It's become very popular in contemporary films to have the twist ending.

My life has taken me down several different paths I never expected it to take me down. Not in a million years.

When I was a young man, I used to dream maybe someday I could be an alderman. Instead of that I became an attorney general, a senator, a vice president, a Democratic nominee.

I never imagined myself making these big movies and being married and having kids.

I've always loved fashion, but it's not what I set out to do.

Films were never in my budget. Didn't occur to me till much later. I hoped for a long, good life, which I've had and I'm having as an actor. I didn't expect the rest.

You know, the smallest thing can change a life. In the blink of an eye, something happens by chance - and when you least expect it - since we’re on a course that you could have never planned, into a future you never imagined. Where will it take you? That’s the journey of our lives: our search for the light. But sometimes, finding the light means you must past through the deepest darkness.

It is strange, but true, that the most important turning-points of life often come at the most unexpected times and in the most unexpected ways.

My life so far has been a long series of things I wasn't ready for.

Generally my typical books have lots of twists and turns a big surprise ending and then usually another surprise at the end and ideally, as in Garden of Beasts, we get to the very end and we find at the last few pages that there's yet another surprise.

I swear to God, my career is like this weird origami thing.

I feel like my career has always been a series of collisions and accidents. Being in the right place at the right time. Having the right haircut. It's so mad to think that it happened in the way that it happened.

I never thought I would have any particular career in movies at all.

It's kind of funny...the moments on which life hinges. I think growing up you always imagine your life - your success - depends on your family and how much money they have, where you go to college, what sort of job you can pin down, starting salary...But it doesn't, you know. You wouldn't believe this, but life hinges on a couple of seconds you never see coming. And what you decide in those few seconds determines everything from then on... And you have no idea what you'll do until you're there.

Otherwise, everything got better and better, just one surprise after another. And that's why I wrote the book about a matter of being in the right place at the right time, and just luck.

Things happen for a reason. We'll see where life takes me from here.

How true it is that our destinies are decided by nothings and that a small imprudence helped by some insignificant accident, as an acorn is fertilized by a drop of rain, may raise the trees on which perhaps we and others shall be crucified.

Fate seemed to be playing a series of extraordinarily unamusing jokes.

There’s no disaster that can’t become a blessing, and no blessing that can’t become a disaster.

It was never my goal to be an actor.