Had An Accident Quotes & Sayings

Well, it was kind of an accident, because plastic is not what I meant to invent. I had just sold photograph paper to Eastman Kodak for 1 million dollars. — Leo Baekeland

If you became blind," I said, "if you were used to finding your way around a house and then, suddenly, one day had an accident
was attacked or something
and became blind, only then would you actually notice the furniture. It would always have been there, but you would never have been aware of it, you would just have gone around it. Only when something becomes hard to cope with do you see it. That's how you become aware of time
when it becomes hard to cope with. — Peter Hoeg

They watch on, evil, incredibly stupid, enjoying my destruction.
'Poor Grendel's had an accident,' I whisper. 'So may you all. — John Gardner

I am pleased to say I find nothing funny, sir," Bent replied as they reached the bottom of the stairs. "I have no sense of humor whatsoever. None at all. It has been proven by phrenology. I have Nichtlachen-Keinwortz syndrome, which for some curious reason is considered a lamentable affliction. I, on the other hand, consider it a gift. I am happy to say that I regard the sight of a fat man slipping on a banana skin as nothing more than an unfortunate accident that highlights the need for care in the disposal of household waste." "Have you tried - " Moist began, but Bent held up a hand. "Please! I repeat, I do not regard it as a burden! And may I say it annoys me when people assume it is such! Do not feel impelled to try to make me laugh, sir! If I had no legs, would you try to make me run? I am quite happy, thank you!" He — Terry Pratchett

Have you ever had something happen to you that there was simply no explanation for? That you can't chalk up to a coincidence, or an accident, or even fate? — Pittacus Lore

People keep calling it an accident. That snake bit me on purpose. I've named it Sneaky. Sneaky had it all planned. I saw its face. — Cath Crowley

Dwayne's only companion at night was a Labrador retriever named Sparky. Sparky could not wag his tail - because of an automobile accident many years ago, so he had no way of telling other dogs how friendly he was. He had to fight all the time. His ears were in tatters. He was lumpy with scars. *** — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

I'd heard about the traffic accidnet on the radio after I'd dropped Abbot off at school. I heard about the accident, that there were mutiple fatalities, an oil tanker ablaze, and the backed-up traffic on the interstate, and I had one simple though : I would take an alternate route. That was it, I would take an alternate route. Worse, I felt lucky - not because I was alive and others were dead but because I'd caught the update in time to avoid the exit ramp that would have landed me in he thick of it. — Bridget Asher

I think one game we played the Oakland Raiders and Jack Tatum and I had an accident on the one-yard line. The only thing that Jack Tatum didn't do was wrap me up so I backed into the endzone backwards. — Earl Campbell

She could not have been born gray. Her
color, her color of brown, was an essential part of her, not an accident. Her anger, timidity, brashness, gentleness, all were elements of her mixed being, her mixed
nature, dark and clear right through, like Baltic amber. She could not exist in the gray people's world. She had not been born. — Ursula K. Le Guin

It was easier to blame myself than to say that it was an accident that I had no control over. Losing control is one of the scariest things. That's why people are afraid of the dark. Or death. They're afraid of not being in control. — Chelsea M. Cameron

Despite my mentors advice that I would never go to heaven fishing with a weighted nymph and a float, I took it up. (As an aside, it is now amazing to me how much of the advice from my elders in those days has not come true. I have not gone blind or deaf, despite some early teen advice to the contrary. The only time I was ever involved in a car accident, I was taken to hospital, but no one seemed to take the slightest bit of notice as to whether I had on clean underwear or not. I have, as yet, been unable to test the nymph and heaven advice.) — Tony Bishop

I learned to tell stories from my mom. "Your dad's not feeling well today," she'd say. I had an accident. She'd say, Remember what happened. You're a clumsy girl. You walk into a door. You tripped and stumbled down a staircase. My favorite story: He doesn't mean to.
She was so good at telling stories that I started to believe them after a while. Maybe I was clumsy. Maybe it was my fault for provoking him.
Maybe he didn't really mean to. — Lauren Oliver

I have so many wonderful people in my life. I've never had any major physical problems or an accident or anything like that. I'm a very, very lucky person, thus far, knock on wood. — Carrie Underwood

Whatever. I was tired and just rolled over onto his arm in my sleep. It's no big deal. Who cares, anyway? So what if Creed had seen us? What, he would have called us a bunch of fags? It's not like we were doing anything. Otter's not like that. Im not like that. It was an accident. — T.J. Klune

This is what I decided:
Chloe is gone. She is never coming back. And the way I've been acting would hurt her. For at least an hour, I switch places with her in my mind-I am dead and Chloe is alive. How would she handle it? She would cry. She would be sad. She would miss me. But she wouldn't stop living. She would let people comfort her. She would sleep in her own room and smile at the memories as she drifted to sleep. And she would probably punch Galen Forza. Which brings me to what else I decided:
Galen Forza is a jerk. The details are hazy, but I'm pretty sure he had something to do with my accident on Monday. Also, he's a bit weird. Staring habit aside, he keeps popping up everywhere. Every time he does, I handle it with the grace of a rhino on stilts. So I'm switching my schedule as soon as I get to school. There is no good reason I should humiliate myself for seven periods a day. — Anna Banks

I'm looking forward to Phoenix. I ran well there last year in the Nationwide Series, and it was one of the tracks I made four Sprint Cup starts at last season. In the Cup race last year, I had a good run going for it being my first time there in a Cup car, and unfortunately got damage from an accident. It's not a restrictor plate race, so this will be the first time this season that I will run a lot of laps in practice. It's also the first race for the new qualifying format, so it will be interesting to see how that works out. Overall, I just want to have a solid run in the BRANDT Chevy. — Justin Allgaier

We are always personally under an agitating pressure and cloud of anxiety. And Olmsted himself had grown increasingly susceptible to illness. He was sixty-eight years old and partly lame from a decades-old carriage accident that had left one leg an inch shorter than the other. He was prone to lengthy bouts of depression. His teeth hurt. He had chronic insomnia and facial neuralgia. A mysterious roaring in his ears at times made it difficult for him to attend to conversation. He was still full of creative steam, still constantly on the move, but overnight train journeys invariably laid him low. Even in his own bed his nights often became sleepless horrors laced with toothache. — Erik Larson

But it seems somehow paltry and wrong to call what happened at Midway a "battle." It had nothing to do with battles the way they were pictured in the popular imagination. There were no last-gasp gestures of transcendent heroism, no brilliant counterstrategies that saved the day. It was more like an industrial accident. It was a clash not between armies, but between TNT and ignited petroleum and drop-forged steel. The thousands who died there weren't warriors but bystanders -- the workers at the factory who happened to draw the shift when the boiler exploded. — Lee Sandlin

He knew what retributions your devils are liable to bring for the way you treat your wife and women or behave while your father is on his deathbed, what you ought to think of your pleasure, of acting like a cockroach; he had the intelligence for the comparison. He had the intelligence to be sublime. But sublimity can't exist only as a special gift of the few, due to an accident of origin, like being born an albino. If it were, what interest would we have in it? — Saul Bellow

Her breasts were nudging out of her bodice. And ... he had his hand on one of
them. When did that happen? God. He jerked away fast and took hold of her shoulder instead. That was neutral ground up there. "Sorry. Don't mean
anything by that. An accident."
Fine pair of breasts she had. White as split almonds. Round as peaches. The nipples peeked out, since the fichu wasn't doing its job. A pair of
dark little roses, pulled up into buds. Tasty looking. And if he got any closer he could put his mouth down and lick them.
That's going to reassure her - you slavering at her tits. — Joanna Bourne

We are, when we love, in an abnormal state, capable of giving at once to the most apparently simple accident, an accident which may at any moment occur, a seriousness which in itself it would not entail. What makes us so happy is the presence in our hearts of an unstable element which we contrive perpetually to maintain and of which we cease almost to be aware so long as it is not displaced. In reality, there is in love a permanent strain of suffering which happiness neutralises, make potential only, postpones, but which may at any moment become, what it would long since have been had we not obtained what we wanted, excruciating. — Marcel Proust

Each electron wants the whole of three-dimensional space for its waves; so Schrodinger generously allows three dimensions for each of them. For two electrons he requires a six-dimensional sub-aether. He then successfully applies his method on the same lines as before. I think you will see now that Schrodinger has given us what seemed to be a comprehensible physical picture only to snatch it away again. His sub-aether does not exist in physical space; it is in a 'configuration space' imagined by the mathematician for the purpose of solving his problems, and imagined afresh with different numbers of dimensions according to the problem proposed. It was only an accident that in the earliest problems considered the configuration space had a close correspondence with physical space, suggesting some degree of objective reality of the waves. Schrodinger's wave mechanics is not a physical theory but a dodge - and a very good dodge too. — Arthur Stanley Eddington

I kept a picture of us in my pillowcase like an absolute nutjob. She'd had it in her pocket the day of the accident. I wanted it as close to my face as possible when I slept every night. Because every night I went to bed hoping it was all a bad dream, and every morning I woke up to the terrifying reality that it was not. You'd think I would — Rachel Van Dyken

Don't go into Mr. McGregor's garden: your Father had an accident there; he was put in a pie by Mrs. McGregor. — Beatrix Potter

The Coroner had cleaned the body so well that there were no visible infections, but the shape of the wounds was enough if you knew what you were looking for: a series of wounds similar to the others, but irregular and distorted as if they'd been stretched out of shape. Just like a bedsore, but smaller. There were only a few ways that kind of thing would happen to an ordinary wound, and only one of them would result in tissue gas. Somehow, by accident or by design, these wounds had been infected with human waste. — Dan Wells

Roth was irritated. Just because he was a Jew too, they always assumed he felt the same way about things. It made him feel a little frustrated. No doubt some of his bad luck had come because he was one, but that was unfair; it wasn't as if he took an interest, it was just an accident of birth. — Norman Mailer

Among them was a middle-aged man supported by two broken sticks. His legs were bent permanently beneath him by accident or disease, and it took him five minutes to cross the room, collect his ballot and shuffle into the booth in front of me. It was painful to watch; as he edged forward I became aware that my heart was racing. Finally - finally - the referendum really was under way. What would happen next? Could Eurico and Basilio have more support than I had assumed? How could the violence of the last seven months fail to have an effect? I should have looked away, but I watched, and saw the man on sticks painstakingly mark his cross in the lower of the two boxes, the one rejecting continuing association with Indonesia. Then he folded the paper, turned his legs around, and began walking slowly towards the ballot box. — Richard Lloyd Parry

Whenever I got out of bed I had to wear a big metal brace that was strapped around me.
I felt like an invalid. I was an invalid. This was crazy.
I'm screwed.
You stupid, stupid idiot, Bear. You could have landed that canopy if you hadn't panicked, or you should have cut it away and pulled that reserve early.
As it was, I had done the worst of both worlds: I had neither gone for the reserve straight away nor had I managed to land the canopy with any degree of skill.
I felt I could have avoided this accident if I had been smarter, faster, clearer-headed. I had messed up, and I knew it.
I vowed that I would never fall short in those areas again.
I would learn from this, and go on to become the fastest, clearest-thinking dude on the planet.
But for now, the tears kept coming. — Bear Grylls

An accident of brain development stacked the deck against children: the mother had three or four years to fuck with your head before your hippocampus began recording lasting memories. You'd been talking to your mom since you were one year old and listening to her for even longer, but you couldn't remember a single word of what you or she had said before your hippocampus kicked into gear. Your — Jonathan Franzen

Is that shooting star just a happy accident or has the universe had it planned for a thousand years?"
He tilted his face to the sky, his eyes tracking an imaginary star as it screamed to earth. He looked back to her. "Either way, you can't stop it. You can beg it to slow down or you can just enjoy the show."
"Am I the star in this story or you?"
Blake wrinkled his nose and chuckled. "Was that a bad analogy? I meant we're the star, Livia. Us. This." He shrugged his shoulders like it was the most obvious thing in the world. "Us being in the same atmosphere is either a great cosmic catastrophe or the most serendipitous rendezvous. — Debra Anastasia

He had also been married to an English girl who was killed in a car accident, a fact to mention because he was the driver. His sorrow was complete; it was as if he had been dipped into a tragic rue. This loss permeated every pore and organ cell, left him, indeed, a complete man, all of one piece, one whole tincture of loss. He spoke in a gentle voice and listened to every word that everyone said, as if words were as much of a comfort as warm clothing. While he sipped his one beer and I had three, — Norman Mailer

Depression was a successful adaptation to ceaseless pain and hardship [ ... ] feeling bad all the time and expecting the worst had been natural ways of equilibrating themselves with the lousiness of their circumstances. Few things gratified depressives, after all, more than really bad news [ ... ] Grim situations were Katz's niche the way murky water was a carp's [ ... ] he might well have started making music again, had it not been for the accident of success. He flopped around on the ground, heavily carplike, his psychic gills straining futilely to extract dark sustenance from an atmosphere of approval and plenitude. — Jonathan Franzen

Whenever I'm in sync with the trends, it's always an accident. I still love wearing clothes I've had for ten years. I think understated luxury is the chicest thing. — Padma Lakshmi

It had not seemed to matter that Rose was only eight years old.
"More than eight," said Rose. "Nearly nine."
"Darling Rose, even almost nearly nine-year-old's don't fall in love," said forgetful Caddy.
Caddy tried very hard to comfort Rose when Tom had left. It was not an easy job. It was like trying to comfort a small, unhappy tiger.
"Who said anything about falling in love?" growled Rose crossly. "Falling! Falling is by accident! I didn't fall in anything!"
"Oh. Right. Sorry, Posy Rose."
"And I am definitely not in love! — Hilary McKay

One such accident had turned the librarian into an ape, since when he had resisted all attempts to turn him back, explaining in sign language that life as an orangutan was considerably better than life as a human being, because all the big philosophical questions resolved themselves into wondering where the next banana was coming from. Anyway, long arms and prehensile feet were ideal for dealing with high shelves. — Terry Pratchett

Pretty average headlines for a worldwide catastrophe," Jane remarked as she read from Hollywood's Highest. "Some man in Africa claimed to have found the cure for AIDS, yet another politician said something about the president and now formally regrets it, and a pop star OD'd while an actress lost fifteen pounds overnight, and here's how you can, too!" She continued reading. "Oh, wow. The 'Celebrititties' section says she was in a car accident and her arms had to be amputated. Damn. — Bryant A. Loney

ahead, burning with embarrassment, confusion and most of all, the unshakeable feeling that I had done something wrong only I didn't know what. And if he hadn't apologized by the time we landed, I could always push him down the escalators at Heathrow and say it was an accident. We spent the rest of the flight in silence, listening to Maura's choked sobs every time the plane shook, followed by another wordless hour in customs and nearly two more driving home. I was half awake, half asleep, delirious from jet lag and unwelcome tears. I didn't care about the ring at all any more, all I wanted to know was why Adam was so incredibly angry. — Lindsey Kelk

It was an awful word. Nothing. It made him sick at heart. He refused to believe it. Hebdemanded that there be something he could do. He demanded that his love be worth something to his child. If it wasn't, life was garbage. He hd to rulenout the idea that life was just a matter of accident, of percentages, because it was just too goddamn much to stand for. There had to be some way you could make yourself be felt. — Don Carpenter

Guido had lived as all Jews do, who, cut off from their people by accident or choice, find that they must inhabit a world whose constituents, being alien, force the mind to succumb to an imaginary populace. — Djuna Barnes

Thomas realized he had changed, that he was not the same man, but like everyone else, he was the result of an accident that had once taken place between nature and chance. An — Simon Van Booy

I closed the door and sank into my desk chair. My heart was pounding even harder. I felt like someone who had just staggered out of her car after an accident on a freeway. This was different from the cockroach and the books and the Barbie. I'd been injured. Someone had tried to physically harm me. — Kate White

Ouch!' The cry escaped before I could stop it, and on either side of me, Chase and Devon leapt to their feet.
'Problem?' Ali asked mildly, amusement dancing in the corners of her eyes. Given the whole Casey thing, I didn't think she had to call to be in such a good mood, but what did I know?
'No problem,' I said darkly, rubbing my shin 'Somebody just accidentally kicked me under the table.' I narrowed my eyes at lake, and she helped herself to another T-bone And smothered it in stake sauce.
'Wasn't an accident' She said cheerfully.
'Lake' Mitch didn't say any more than his daughters name and she rolled her eyes.
'It's not like I shot her'. — Jennifer Lynn Barnes

I used to be terrified of death. My grandfather was terminal in the hospital across from my high school, yet I never visited him. That fact still haunts me to this day. Years later, my arms were around my grandmother as she struggled with her last breaths. I told her we were with her and everything was going to be okay. She died as I held her tightly and I felt her body lose life. It was the most peaceful moment I ever experienced, and I felt joy for her. It was an emotional, intellectual, and spiritual moment for me. I wasn't afraid anymore ... One day years later I received the phone call every parent dreads. My daughter was in a serious automobile accident. As I raced to her I prepared myself for the news she had died. Once again, I felt an unexpected and profound emotion. She lived, but in the face of that horrifying time there was a strange overall calm. I realized, no matter what, everything was going to be okay. I remembered I wasn't afraid anymore. — John K. Brown

One hardly knows where, in the history of science, to look for an important movement that had its effective start in so pure and simple an accident as that which led to the building of the great Washington telescope, and went on to the discovery of the satellites of Mars. — Simon Newcomb

I've never tried to drive my career in any particular direction. I've always been an in-the-moment, live-for-today guy. I've never had a goal, and nearly everything I've done has been an accident. I just play to me, and if I can amuse myself, I consider it a victory. — Doug Stanhope

The only modern narrative that handles the conundrum semi-successfully is Richard Kelly's Donnie Darko, where schizophrenic heartthrob Jake Gyllenhaal uses a portal to move back in time twelve days, thereby allowing himself to die in an accident he had previously avoided. By removing himself from the equation, he never meets his new girlfriend, which keeps her from dying in a car accident that was his fault. — Chuck Klosterman

The mother-in-law had an accident at work. A hot rivet dropped down her drawers and she fell off the oil rig. — Les Dawson

I never envisioned myself being a film star at all. Most people know that pro wrestling is a little bit of an accident for me. I never really had any real aspirations of being in front of a camera. — Roddy Piper

I was told he could never go back, for he had shot his own grandfather out hunting and his family would impale him if he fell into their hands. Turks are never convinced by a hunting accident, especially if it is the heir who removes the owner of numerous flocks. All the same, Joseph was an honourable knight; perhaps his grandfather really did look like a deer. — Alfred Duggan

This purpose had not been preponderantly to make money
it had been rather to learn something and to do something. To learn something interesting, and to do something useful
this was, roughly speaking, the programme he had sketched, and of which the accident of his wife having an income appeared to him in no degree to modify the validity. — Henry James

Martin is always telling me to put all of this behind me, to get on with my life. But the thing is, before Jesse, I never really had a life. I had a routine. I did things. But aside from the accident" - he gestured with his prosthetic arm - "nothing ever happened to me. But she happened. And it was like a train wreck. It was big and painful and beautiful and every second mattered. You know what Beaudelaire said about love? It's 'an oasis of horror in a desert of boredom.' But it's still an oasis. Our time together - that's the story of my life. Everything before her was just the boring setup. Like the first hour of a miniseries, the part that's just padding to stretch it out for three nights. And the time since she's gone - that's just been some sort of weird, dragged-out anticlimax. I can feel myself sitting in the audience watching my life and wondering, 'Why isn't this movie over? — Phoef Sutton

From the earliest days of the nation anyone with an intelligence equal to that of sparrows had realized that the peninsula ought logically to be united as one state, but historical accident had decreed that one portion be assigned to Maryland, whose citizens despised the Eastern Shore and considered it a backwater; one portion to the so-called state of Delaware, which never could find any reasonable justification for its existence; and the final portion to Virginia, which allowed its extreme southern fragment of the Eastern Shore to become the most pitiful orphan in America. — James A. Michener

I did not tell him my decision, that would have broken my will. I did not wait to have breakfast with him but only drank some coffee and made an excuse to go home. I knew the excuse did not fool Joey; but he did not know how to protest or insist; he did not know that this was all he needed to have done. Then I, who had seen him that summer nearly every day till then, no longer went to see him. He did not come to see me. I would have been very happy to see him if he had, but the manner of my leavetaking had begun a constriction which neither of us knew how to arrest. When I finally did see him, more or less by accident, near the end of the summer, I made up a long and totally untrue story about a girl I was going with and when school began again I picked up with a rougher, older crowd and was very nasty to Joey. And the sadder this made him, the nastier I became. He moved away at last, out of the neighborhood, away from our school, and I never saw him again. — James Baldwin

I know now that everything after the accident was merely a tactic to indulge in escapism and self-delusion. When you are hit by a streetcar that almost smashes you to a pulp, when you experience your own end...there is no recovery, only temporary respite, she thought.

Pain made me aware of my body. My body made me aware of deterioration and death. That awareness made me old. My death sentence may have been deferred, but I now had to live with a twofold realization. Not only was I going to die - there was nothing unusual about that except that I was made to realize it at a tender age - but I knew exactly what that meant. Because I had already been through it. Unlike other condemned people for whom death is an abstraction because they have no idea what really awaits them, my stay of death came with a constant reminder, the presence of pain. — Slavenka Drakulic

Don't worry. If we sink, we'll swim together to shore. We'll use your bewitching chapeau as a float."
The nose of the yacht dipped hard, then rose. The wing began a low howl around us.
"I'm not blotto," he said, in response to my expression. He turned to the railing and chucked the empty flute to the waves. "Not yet, in any case."
I went to stand beside him. The flute had sunk beneath the surface already, on its way to an eternity of sand and tide.
"That's good. Because I can't swim."
"Why did you go swimming in the grotto, then," he asked too pleasantly, "if you can't swim?"
"I wasn't swimming there. I was smoke, at the ceiling, when you came in. Falling into the water was an accident."
"You're welcome," Armand said.
I refused to ask for what. We both knew. — Shana Abe

First Aid and Home Nursing classes were popular during 1913, and at the beginning of 1914. We all went to these, bandaged each other's legs and arms, and even attempted to do neat head-bandaging: much more difficult. We passed our exams, and got a small printed card to prove our success. So great was female enthusiasm at this time that if any man had an accident he was in mortal terror of ministering women closing in on him.
'Don't let those First Aiders come near me!' The cry would rise. 'Don't touch me, girls. Don't touch me! — Agatha Christie

Now, when it was too late, and Life's shops were closed, he regretted not having bought a certain book he had always wanted; never having gone through an earthquake, a fire, a train accident; never having seen Tatsienlu in Tibet, or heard blue magpies chattering in Chinese willows; not having spoken to that errant schoolgirl with shameless eyes, met one day in a lonely glade; not having laughed at the poor little joke of a shy ugly woman, when no one had laughed in the room; having missed trains, allusions, and opportunities; not having handed the penny he had in his pocket to that old street violinist playing to himself tremulously on a certain bleak day in a certain forgotten town. — Vladimir Nabokov

My fiancee's brother-in-law was recently paralysed in an accident and it really brought home the fact that thousands of young people live with spinal injuries. It's an issue I wish had more coverage. — Gary Lineker

If Sally had been in an accident or come down with some overtly physical disease, I would not hesitate to tell him about it, confident that his sympathies would flow in my direction as a matter of course. But psychosis defies empathy; few people who have not experienced it up close buy the idea of a behavioral disease. It has the ring of an excuse, a license for self-absorption on the most extreme scale. It suggests that one chooses madness and not the other way around. (86) — Michael Greenberg

He accepted then declared, "I drive. You ride. Not a rule, that's a law. Get me?"
"What if you've had a freak accident and you've broken your arm and ankle?" I asked for specifics.
"If that shit happens, I hope to God you're smart enough to pick up a phone and call an ambulance rather than draggin' my ass to my car, which would be agony, shoving it in, which would be more agony, and taking me to the hospital — Kristen Ashley

Good sociologists have always had an insatiable curiosity about about even the trivialities of human behaviour, and if this curiosity leads a sociologist to devote many years to the painstaking exploration of some small corner of the social world that may appear quite trivial to others, so be it: Why do more teenagers pick their noses in rural Minnesota than in rural Iowa? What are the patterns of church socials over a twenty-year period in small-town Saskatchewan? What is the correlation between religious affiliation and accident-proneness among elderly Hungarians? — Peter Berger

I had a cousin, Randall, killed on Iwo Jima. Have I told you?

Have I told you his was a beautiful smile? Not the smile of a cynic, nor the easy, hungry smile of boys his age, whose smiles that aim to get them somewhere, are a commodity in exchange for God knows what. No. His was completely without intent; an accident of a smile. The kind of smile that would have surprised him if he could have seen it for himself. But he was too young to know his own extraordinariness. — Kate Walbert

The instruction here is not for every kind of writer - not for the writer of nurse books or thrillers or porno or the cheaper sort of sci-fi - though it is true that what holds for the most serious kind of fiction will generally hold for junk fiction as well. (Not everyone is capable of writing junk fiction: It requires an authentic junk mind. Most creative-writing teachers have had the experience of occasionally helping to produce, by accident, a pornographer. The most elegant techniques in the world, filtered through a junk mind, become elegant junk techniques.) — John Gardner

She had moved to Los Angeles from the Midwest, lured by a job with a publisher. But the publisher was bought by another soon after, and she was left without a job. Turning to freelance writing, an erratic marketplace, she found herself either swamped with work or unable to pay her rent. She often had to ration phone calls, and for the first time was without health insurance. This lack of coverage was particularly distressing: she found herself catastrophizing about her health, sure every headache signaled a brain tumor, picturing herself in an accident whenever she had to drive somewhere. She often found herself lost in a long reverie of worry, a medley of distress. But, she said, she found her worries almost addictive. Borkovec — Daniel Goleman

You make me thirsty, Promethea, my river, you make me eternally thirsty, my water. As if I had spent my life in an old house of dried mud, so dry myself that I could not even thirst, until yesterday. And suddenly yesterday, the dusty floor of my old house burst open and while I was still dozing away my parched existence, drop by drop I heard the music of coolness awaken the thirst under my dry soul. And leaning over the dark shaft of my life, I saw my childhood springs unearthed. Is that always how (by accident) we rediscover Magdalenian riches? — Helene Cixous

Alexander wept when he heard from Anaxarchus that there was an infinite number of worlds; and his friends asking him if any accident had befallen him, he returns this answer: Do you not think it a matter worthy of lamentation that when there is such a vast multitude of them, we have not yet conquered one? — Plutarch

Leola Mae Harmon. I saw a movie about her on the Lifetime channel. Leola was an air force nurse who was in a car accident and the lower part of her face got all mangled, but then Armand Assante, who plays a plastic surgeon, said he could fix her. Leola had to endure hours of painful reconstructive surgery, during which her husband left her because she didn't have any lips (which I guess is why the movie is called Why Me?). Armand Assante said he would make her a new pair of lips, only the other air force doctors didn't like the fact that he wanted to make them out of skin from Leola's vagina. But he did it anyway, and then he and Leola got married and worked together to help give other accident victims vagina lips. And the whole thing turned out to have been based on a true story. — Meg Cabot

I had no work after 'Gangster' for two years, and my sister Rangoli met with an accident that destroyed her looks. My struggle with my parents combined with the industry not accepting me made me feel alienated. — Kangana Ranaut

How came she by her death? How came she there? Was she slain by accident, or had she met with violence? were the questions that pressed upon our thoughts. But we said little then and after a time left her where we found her. It mattered not to her that the bed was hard or the air cold.
("A Night In An Old Castle") — George Payne Rainsford James

My high school guidance counselor, Mrs. Inverholl, once had me take an aptitude test to figure out my future. The number one job recommendation for my set of skills was an air traffic accident investigator, of which there are fewer than fifty in the world. The number two job was a museum curator for Chinese-American studies. The number three job was a circus clown. — Jodi Picoult

I really discovered I had thyroid disease by accident. My son was having some health concerns, and as I filled out his patient history I noticed I had a lot of similar symptoms. I mentioned it to the doctor, and he ran blood work and finally an ultrasound of my thyroid. — Kim Alexis

When Job lifted his face to the Storm, when he asked and was answered, he learned that he was very small. He learned that his life was a story. He spoke with the Author, and learned that the genre had not been an accident. God tells stories that make Sunday school teachers sweat and mothers write their children permission slips excusing them from encountering reality. — N.D. Wilson

Why, what's the matter wi' the poor child?" she demanded of Jamie. "Has she had an accident o' some sort?"
"No, it's only she's married me," he said, "though if ye care to call it an accident, ye may. — Diana Gabaldon

Naturally I feel no shame in writing these things because of the time which separates the moment when they are written
when only I can see them
from the moment when they will be read by other people, a moment which I feel will never come. By then I could have had an accident or died; a war or a revolution could have broken out. This delay makes it possible for me to write today, in the same way I used to lie in the scorching sun for a whole day at sixteen, or make love wihout contraceptives at twenty: without thinking about the consequences — Annie Ernaux

Those who are born immortal instinctively know how to cope with it, but Wowbagger was not one of them. Indeed he had come to hate them, the load of serene bastards. He had had his immortality thrust upon him by an unfortunate accident with an irrational particle accelerator, a liquid lunch and a pair of rubber bands. The precise details of the accident are not important because no one has ever managed to duplicate the exact circumstances under which it happened, and many people have ended up looking very silly, or dead, or both, trying. — Douglas Adams

I had an aunt named 'abnormal Shauna' once. But she passed away in an unfortunate cliff-top interpretative dance and fireworks accident. — Joshua Donellan

He had noticed my bandaged hand.
"An accident," Warthrop said tersely.
"Dr. Warthrop chopped off my finger with a butcher knife."
Von Helrung's brow knotted up in confusion. "By accident?"
"No," I answered. "That part was on purpose. — Rick Yancey

An accident of birth had signed her death warrant.
He could mark her name off his to-do list. — Linda Howard

An early spring started one morning in March with a swarm of sudden, glassy, bird cries, and then the cool jewelry of primrose and violet loosened themselves in the dirt. Then summer burst into the world like a gorgeous car accident- opening eyes all over our bodies in the brilliant light. Fall- the smell of pumpkin guts, sluttish and unsweetened. Until winter fell all over us like pieces of heaven, glazed with oxygen or ether, hitting the grounder in small, cold shards. It was like a year in Eden where no Eve had ever lived. — Laura Kasischke

His first stretch alerted me to a concerning issue. "Um, Raphael, I think you should change."
Biceps bulged, thigh muscles popped, and I was fairly certain he just added another pack to his abs. "I am quite comfortable, Abigail Miller."
I crossed my arms. "Well, I'm not. I know you go commando under your skirt and I don't want to see angel parts I wasn't meant to see."
He shot me a sideways glance. "You have seen said angel parts on Alexander. Mine are much more impressive, however."
My mouth and eyes widened. "Oh my gosh! I cannot believe you said that, Raphael. And it was an accident!"
He continued to stare.
"I was bleeding to death!"
He tilted his head at me, remaining silent.
I threw up my arms. "Fine, wear the damn skirt. But you had better keep things tucked in. Any hint of said angel parts and this is over."
Raphael smiled. He won? How did he do that? He was diabolical. — Ashlan Thomas

Following my accident, I plumped up like a freshly roasted wiener, my skin cracking to accommodate the expanding meat. The doctors, with their hungry scalpels, hastened the process with a few quick slices. The procedure is called an escharotomy, and it gives the swelling tissue the freedom to expand. It's rather like the uprising of your secret inner being, finally given license to claw through the surface. The doctors thought they had sliced me open to commence my healing but, in fact, they only release the monster- a thing of engorged flesh, suffused with juice. — Andrew Davidson

Humility was a cult in my family. I only got it out of my father by accident when he was very old that he had won an Olympic gold medal. — Hugh Laurie

By the time the sixties hit their home bases, we the kids, were already born, and our parents found themselves stuck between an entrenched belief that children needed to be raised in a traditional household, and a new sense that anything was possible, that the alternative lifestyle was out there for the asking. There they were in marriages they once thought were a necessity and with children they'd had almost by accident in a world that was suddenly saying, 'No necessities! No accidents! Drop Everything!' A little too old to take full advantage of the cultural revolution, our parents just got all the fallout. Freedom hit them obliquely, and invidiously, rather than head-on. Instead of waiting longer to get married, our parents got divorced; Instead of becoming feminists, our mothers were left to become displaced homemakers. A lot of unhappy situations were dissolved by people who were not quite young or free enough to start again. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

My mother had once said I was an accident waiting to happen and it started with my conception. — Dannika Dark

He had murdered his wife in a fit of jealousy, and immediately given himself up to the police. (This had considerably mitigated his sentence). Such crimes are never judged harshly in Siberia, but rather looked upon as an unfortunate accident which ought to be pitied and regretted rather than punished. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

She survived it. She was able to survive it, because she did not believe in suffering. She faced with astonished indignation the ugly fact of feeling pain, and refused to let it matter. Suffering was a senseless accident, it was not part of life as she saw it. She would not allow pain to become important. She had no name for the kind of resistance she offered, for the emotion from which the resistance came; but the words that stood as its equivalent in her mind were: It does not count - it is not to be taken seriously. She knew these were the words, even in the moments when there was nothing left within her but screaming and she wished she could lose the faculty of consciousness so that it would not tell her that what could not be true was true. Not to be taken seriously - an immovable certainty within her kept repeating - pain and ugliness are never to be taken seriously. — Ayn Rand

Mariam kept her eyes to the ground, on her shadow, on her executioner's shadow trailing her.
Though there had been moments of beauty in it, Mariam knew that life for the most part had been unkind to her. But as she walked the final twenty paces, she could not help but wish for more of it. She wished she could she Leila again, wished to hear the clangour of her laugh, ...

Mariam wished for so much in those final moments.
Yet as she closed her eyes, it was not regret any longer but a sensation of abundant peace that washed over her. She thought of her entry into this world, the harami child of a lowly villager, an unintended thing, a pitiable, regrettable accident. A weed. And yet she was leaving the world as a woman who has loved and been loved back. She was leaving it as a friend, a companion, a guardian. A mother. A person of consequence at last.
This was a legitimate end to a life of illegitimate beginnings."
--A Thousand Splendid Suns — Khaled Hosseini

It was mankind and not the Almighty that had ordered the universe; only a man could look at an accident and call it a creation with Himself at the centre. — Joseph O'Connor

One year, on Yom Kippur eve, Salanter did not show up in synagogue for services. The congregation was extremely worried; they could only imagine that their rabbi had suddenly taken sick or been in an accident. In any case, they would not start the service without him. During the wait, a young woman in the congregation became agitated. She had left her infant child at home asleep in its crib; she was certain she would only be away a short while. Now, because of the delay, she slipped out to make sure that the infant was all right. When she reached her house, she found her child being rocked in the arms of Rabbi Salanter. He had heard the baby crying while walking to the synagogue and, realizing that the mother must have gone off to services, had gone into the house to calm him. — Joseph Telushkin

He's a funny man, Dumbledore. I think he sort of wanted to give me a chance. I think he knows more or less everything that goes on here, you know. I reckon he had a pretty good idea we were going to try, and instead of stopping us, he just taught us enough to help. I don't think it was an accident he let me find out how the Mirror worked. It's almost like he thought I had the right to face Voldemort if I could ... — J.K. Rowling

I stabbed him," Lizzy said bluntly. "That's how he got that scar."
"Why? I'm sorry. That's personal. I shouldn't ask that." She blushed.
"It's okay." Lizzy laid a hand on the woman's arm. "I was mad at a woman for flirting with him and he tried to take the knife away from me. It was an accident."
"I'll be right back with your drinks and appetizer." She turned so fast that she ran into a bus boy with a tray of dirty glasses and he had to do some fancy footwork to keep it all from hitting the floor.
"Lying on Sunday?" Toby chuckled. "The preacher will make you deliver the benediction next week as penance."
-Lizzy, a waitress and Toby — Carolyn Brown

This sex thing. We never used to be hung up like this. Nature doesn't give little kids problems except when there's some kind of an accident
like that eight-year-old South American girl that had a baby. But that's practically a mutation, right? — Paul Zindel

A great diving scene. Worth the read just for that:

"Randy! You have the best eyes for bubbles. Find my missing diver."
Paul leaned over the boat and yelled at the people waiting in the water. "Hey! Where's . . ." He examined the faces. It didn't take long to figure out who was missing. His heart spiraled to his feet.
"Oh, no, no, no!" He didn't hesitate to jump to action. He yelled out orders as he put his gear on in record time. "Get back on the boat. Now!"
"I see bubbles! Over there, 'bout fifteen meters," Randy called before anyone had a chance to do anything.
Paul stood on the back of the boat, all geared up and holding an extra tank with a regulator already attached. He looked to see where Randy pointed and took a giant stride into the water. He didn't bother to surface before starting the fastest descent he'd ever made. — S. Jackson Rivera

Poor Grendel's had an accident. So may you all. — John Gardner

The disaster at the Chernobyl plant, along with the war in Afghanistan and the cruise-missile question, is generally seen today as the start of the decline of the Soviet Union. Just as the great famine of 1891 had mercilessly laid bare the failure of czarism, almost a century later Chernobyl clearly showed how divided, rigid and rotten the Soviet regime had become. The principal policy instruments, secrecy and repression, no longer worked in a modern world with its accompanying means of communication. The credibility of the party leadership sank to the point at which it could sink no further. In the early hours of 26 April, 1986, two explosions took place in one of the four reactors at the giant nuclear complex. It was an accident of the kind scientists and environmental activists had been warning about for years, particularly because of its effects: a monstrous emission of iodine-131 and caesium-137. Huge radioactive clouds drifted across half of Europe: — Geert Mak

From since I could remember I've always been an artist, drawing, painting and so forth. I would also always draw made up rock n' roll characters in a band who each had their own style and personalities. I think by accident I was already becoming a fashion designer. — Ashley Purdy

Leo was the only one who had never petitioned Francie for a loan using The Nest as collateral. Jack and Melody and Bea had all asked at one time that she consider an earlier dispersal, but she stubbornly refused.Until Leo's accident. — Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney

You drank acid, and it turned a vitality drink in your stomach. You had an accident, and you find yourself sleeping comfortably on your sofa. Robbers shot you, and the bullets became a basking fire on your skin. Your enemy cursed you, and you became a president next year. You were headstrong and rude, then suddenly, you find yourself very humble and compassionate. Don't think all these things are magic, you're not under the possession of the world nor its people, but God is the power behind your metamorphosis. — Michael Bassey Johnson

I hate turkeys. If you go to the grocery store, you start to get mad at turkeys. You see turkey ham, turkey bologna, turkey pastrami. Somebody just needs to tell the turkeys, "Man, just be yourselves!" I already like you, little fella. I used to draw you. If you had a couple of fingers missing, you would draw a really messed-up turkey. That turkey was in an accident! — Mitch Hedberg