Quotes & Sayings About Happenstance

Every human relationship begins with a coincidence. Even the most fundamental relationship - that of parent and child - begins entirely with a coincidence. The child is produced by whatever serendipity brought its parents together, and the fact that the child was born to its particular parents instead of to another couple is pure happenstance. Thus, children have no choice over the relationship that is most important to their existence.
By contrast, friends and lovers choose each other, but even these choices are reactions to whatever random coincidence made the resulting relationship possible. — Zack Love

Not only is it not remarkable to be a single woman, there's no stigma attached. You see more and more women choosing to be single as well as happenstance. — Pepper Schwartz

As if the parents we were born to weren't always a matter of happenstance: an elbow jostled at a bar, a muscular hand smoothing the hair away from a blue-shadowed eye, a quick decision that this girl looks hot or that guy seems safe. We are never guaranteed that the people who fit together so deliciously in the heat of a moment can building a lasting love. And it is love, the breadth and force of being wholly, unabashedly loved - not just having two parents who look like the wax figures on a wedding cake - that affirms and redeems us. Poverty alone doesn't always spark violence. And a two-parent home isn't always the antidote. The urge to obliterate is as dark and unknowable as the hollows of our bones. — Laura Bogart

There's so much happenstance, so many accidents - stumbling into something and finding it interesting and living with it over time and building on it. It's okay to work from doubt. You need to be willing to not know. — Ellen Gallagher

Chromosomal dance oh, heavenly happenstance rare creation, you -Marcus (Poetry Spam #22) — Megan McCafferty

People make decisions that may have one intent and yet are somehow perverted into something else. And sometimes it's because of design. Sometimes it's because of happenstance. But very often, it's mysterious to them. — Atom Egoyan

I am illegitimate," she said distinctly, as if he were a foreigner trying to learn English. "You are a viscount. You can't marry a bastard."
"What about the Duke of Clarence? He had ten bastard children by that actress ... what was her name ... "
"Mrs. Jordan."
"Yes, that one, Their children were all illegitimate, but some of them married peers."
"You're not the Duke of Clarence."
"That's right. I'm not a blueblood any more than you are. I inherited the title purely by happenstance"
"That doesn't matter. If your married me, it would be scandalous and inappropriate, and doors would be closed to you."
"Good God, woman, I let two of my sisters marry Gypsies. Those doors have already been closed, bolted, and nailed shut. — Lisa Kleypas

Sometimes I remind myself that I almost skipped the party, that I almost went to a different college, that the whim of a minute could have changed everything and everyone. Our lives, so settled, so specific, are built on happenstance. — Anna Quindlen

... Amongst these legends of dragon hoards,
Where secret, precious things are stored,
There golden nugget and diamond shard,
There treasure-keeper hoped to guard.
As bolted doorway securely braced,
hoping its treasures to ever hold,
hoping beyond when time grows old,
So stood the keeper in its place.
A statue of unrelenting stance
Still stands victim to happenstance,
For treasure-keeper did not bargain
on a bit of chance and a bit of dwargen ...
- Dwenzuak the dwargen — T. William Watts

The effect hip-hop had on me was enormous. I was exposed to it by happenstance. My father worked at a radio station in New York called WKTU Disco 92. It was the first radio station in New York City to play disco in the late '70s. — Michael Rapaport

What he wanted above all to get right was the web of relationships a dozen column inches had never been enough to contain. Family, work, romance, church, municipality, history, happenstance ... He wanted to follow the soul far enough out along these lines of relationship to discover that there was no fixed point where one person ended and another began. — Garth Risk Hallberg

Happenstance is the myth of the simple mind, for it is the deliberate genius of God that what appears entirely disjointed always reveals itself to be stunningly seamless. And it is in reflecting on such stunning ingenuity that our faith becomes seamless. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

Anger at happenstance for its absurd timing. Anger at myself for being so angry. I hate being angry and every time I got this angry it made me more angry at the fact that I was so angry. I realized though that I couldn't really be mad at any of those things. — David Bowick

If an essay has a 'motive,' it is linked more to happenstance and opportunity than to the driven will. A genuine essay is not a doctrinaire tract or a propaganda effort or a broadside. — Cynthia Ozick

The cry that 'fantasy is escapist' compared to the novel is only an echo of the older cry that novels are 'escapist' compared with biography, and to both cries one should make the same answer: that freedom to invent outweighs loyalty to mere happenstance, the accidents of history; and good readers should know how to filter a general applicability from a particular story. — Tom Shippey

I went to really good New York City public schools that had arts programs. So in junior high, I got into the drama department. From there, I went to a performing arts high school in New York City called Laguardia and I just kind of fell into the professional side by happenstance. — Merritt Wever

So much of life is happenstance. It makes me laugh when I go to a bookstore and see all those titles about controlling your life. You're lucky if you can control your bladder. — Rita Mae Brown

The small stuff matters. The company that became the largest and most powerful in history isn't a military contractor or a car company. It isn't the result of savvy lobbyists in Washington, or the happenstance of controlling the supply of petroleum, or some kind of cabal that is beyond the understanding of ordinary people. The largest and most powerful company in history is built by each of us handing over three single dollar bills over and over again. — Charles Fishman

Humans do not proceed in an orderly fashion from one scene to the next. Memory lies underneath happenstance; hope and dread sprawl on top. Our days and nights are their endless orgies. — Catherynne M Valente

We are taught to put fun and serious pursuits on a continuum as opposed extremes, when this dichotomy is entirely false, made even worse when we act as though we can instantly exchange one for the other ... Exerting yourself at a task that is serious and rewarding can still be quite fun, but doing something fun because you have a neurotic need to pack your life full of un is pretty much a guarantee that any long-term benefits you derive will be entirely happenstance. — Anthony D. Ravenscroft

In that turbulent time, the happenstance First Lady, Betty Ford, was certain of one thing: she would not change. 'I've spent too many years as me,' she declared. 'I can't suddenly turn into a princess. — Bonnie Angelo

My work is on the one hand laboured, and on the other completely happenstance and intuitive. — Ellen Gallagher

Lucretius wrote in The Nature of Things: Especially since this world is the product of Nature, the happenstance Of the seeds of things colliding into each other by pure chance In every possible way, no aim in view, at random, blind, Till sooner or later certain atoms suddenly combined So that they lay the warp to weave the cloth of mighty things: Of earth, of sea, of sky, of all species of living beings. — Marcelo Gleiser

The most powerful life is the most simple life. The most powerful life is the life that knows where it's going, that knows where the source of strength is; it is the life that stays free of clutter and happenstance and hurriedness. — Max Lucado

I think of how life takes unexpected twists and turns, sometimes through sheer happenstance, sometimes through calculated decisions. In the end, it can all be called fate, but to me, it is more a matter of faith. — Emily Giffin

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

Actually, I liked the fact that happenstance had brought him to the right place; it was comforting to know that that life would support us if only we were listening. — Neil Abramson

For there was no doubt in Bundy's mind about his ability to handle ... the world. The job was not just a happenstance thing; he had, literally and figuratively, been bred for it, or failing this, Secretary of State. He was the brightest light in that glittering constellation around the President, for if those years had any central theme, if there was anything that bound the men, their followers and their subordinates together, it was the belief that sheer intelligence and rationality could answer and solve anything. — David Halberstam

One of the underlying things I like to do in books, is just say, stop and look at this for a moment. Not that you've got to believe that Jesus was real, or not to believe in God, but the belief that it isn't just happenstance. — Dean Koontz

Once was happenstance, twice might be coincidence, but thrice or more indicated the actions of your enemies. — Robert Jordan

Life is not a path of coincidence, happenstance, and luck, but rather an unexplainable, meticulously charted course for one to touch the lives of others and make a difference in the world. BARBARA DILLINHAM — Natasha Turner

It is time for us to fight, and we do so not because we seek the glory of men, but because the other options are worse. We follow the Codes not because they bring gain, but because we loathe the people we would otherwise become. We stand here on this battlefield alone because of who we are.
Death is the end of all men! What is the measure of him once he is gone? The wealth he accumulated and left for his heirs to squabble over? The glory he obtained,only to be passed on to those who slew him? The lofty positions he held through happenstance? No. We fight here because we understand. The end is the same. It is the path that separates men. When we taste that end, we will do so with our heads held high, eyes to the sun.
I am not ashamed of what I have become. Other men may debase themselves to destroy me. Let them have their glory. For I will retain mine! — Brandon Sanderson

Sometimes events that lead us bereft of anything but grief just happen for no reason other than happenstance
a car turns left instead of right, a train is missed, a call comes too late
and the real test of our humanness is whether, in light of that knowledge, we are ever able to recover. When we again find our way despite the inability to manufacture a deeper meaning in our suffering, that I think is when God smiles upon us, proud of the strength of his creation. — Neil Abramson

On the proper role of coincidence in fiction
- more exactly in storymaking, ... Aristotle declares in effect that since real life now and then includes unlikely coincidences both idle and consequential ... a storymaker may legitimately deploy such a possible-though-improbable happenstance to begin the tale or to give its plot-screws an early turn. Thereafter, however, the Plausible (even when strictly impossible) is ever to be preferred to the Possible-but-Unlikely; and in the resolution of a plot, most particularly, coincidence ought to be eschewed. Fate in fiction, decrees the great A, ought to flow from character and situation, not from chance; let no god on wires drop down at climax-time to rescue the storymaker from whatever dramaturgical corner his want of experience, talent, or judgment has painted him into. — John Barth

Significant inventions are not mere accidents. The erroneous view [that they are] is widely held, and it is one that the scientific and technical community, unfortunately, has done little to dispel. Happenstance usually plays a part, to be sure, but there is much more to invention than the popular notion of a bolt out of the blue. Knowledge in depth and in breadth are virtual prerequisites. Unless the mind is thoroughly charge beforehand, the proverbial spark of genius, if it should manifest itself, probably will find nothing to ignite. — Paul Flory

She thought of the boy's features as an exquisite distillation out of random patterns-endless queues of happenstance meeting at this nexus. — Frank Herbert

Souls, like rays of light, exist in perfect, parallel equality, always. But for when infinitely short a time they pass through the rough and delaying mechanism of life, they separate and disentangle, encountering different obstacles, traveling at different rates, like light refracted by the friction of things in its path. Emerging on the other side, they run together once more, in perfection. For the short and difficult span when confounded by matter and time they are made unequal, they try to bind together as they always were and eventually will be. The impulse to do so is called love. The extend to which they exceed is called justice. And the energy lost in the effort is called sacriface. On the infinite scale of things, this life is to a spark what a spark is to all the time man can imagine, but still, like a sudden rapids or bend in the river, it is that to which the eye of God may be drawn from time to time out of interest in happenstance. — Mark Helprin

See, the world is narrowing. We each live in a bubble of attitude. Everything tailored for us. No happenstance, only what I already am and know. At a certain point I find my shape is less here.' A palm flat on his chest.
'More out there.' Laying the palm on his keyboard. — Matthew Blakstad

Happenstance intersecting with received wisdom produces something entirely new and significant — William Boyd

If adults also don't live in a world designed for us. Climate, entropy, accident, crowds, happenstance, erosion, heartbreak - we are fools to think that we are in control of the universe. Children are right to allow the humility of their smallness to rule the day. My misery gives way to fun when you take an object, event, situation, or scenario that wasn't designed for you, that isn't invested in you, that isn't concerned in the slightest for your experience of it, and then treat it as if it were. — Ian Bogost

History is not happenstance: it is conspiratorial. Carefully planned and executed by people in power. — George Carlin

If we are merely a chance product of 'random happenstance' and nothing more, doesn't it strike you as a bit odd that we have the ability to contemplate the question of 'random happenstance' with such methodical complexity? — Craig D. Lounsbrough

Lying here, during all this time after my own small fall, it has become my conviction that things mean pretty much what we want them to mean. We'll pluck significance from the least consequential happenstance if it suits us and happily ignore the most flagrantly obvious symmetry between separate aspects of our lives if it threatens some cherished prejudice or cosily comforting belief; we are blindest to precisely whatever might be most illuminating. — Iain M. Banks

Peace is not happenstance. It is a living fire that must be fed constantly. It must be tended to with vigilance, else it dies out. — Libba Bray

It's a child's world, full of separate places. Give me a paper and pencil now and ask me to draw a map of the fields I roamed when I was small, and I cannot do it. But change the question, and ask me to list what was there and I can fill pages. The wood ant's nest. The newt pond. The oak covered in marble galls. The birches by the motorway fence with fly agarics at their feet. These things were the waypoints of my world. And other places became magic through happenstance. When I found a huge red underwing moth behind the electricity junction box at the end of my road, that box became a magic place. I needed to check behind it every time I walked past, though nothing was ever there. I'd run to check the place where once I'd caught a grass snake, look up at the tree that one afternoon had held a roosting owl. These places had a magical importance, a pull on me that other places did not, however devoid of life they were in all the visits since. — Helen Macdonald

I would change very little because I have been very, very fortunate. A lot of things fell into place for me simply by happenstance. When that happens you don't really want to change anything, even if you could. Editorially my regrets are few and for the most part minor. I look back on my first published book and think I held on to it too long, babied it too long. — Michael Connelly

I'm always intrigued by my nonsensical concern with picking out a bunch of things that look exactly alike the ones that somehow I feel are the best and belong to me. It's that same crazy urge or superstition, or whatever it is, that makes me open a Bible in a hotel room, hoping for some great happenstance spiritual word of advice. More often than not, I hit a long passage of begats and begots, which contain little inspiration other than the fact that procreation is the highest aim of life. — Vincent Price

If something or someone is presented to us once, we will often dismiss it as being nothing more than happenstance. If that person or situation is presented twice, it is God slapping us in the face and telling us to pay attention. It is fate. — Scott Hildreth

I simply can't look into the heavens on a crisp starry night and somehow bring myself to believe that the gaping expanse that engulfs the whole of me is the product of chance happenstance. And neither can I believe that the gaping expanse that rests within me is anything less. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

Has all this suffering, this dying around us, a meaning? For, if not, then ultimately there is no meaning to survival; for a life whose meaning depends upon such a happenstance - as whether one escapes or not - ultimately would not be worth living at all. — Viktor E. Frankl

Hey, this is weird. I ordered one frozen yogurt and they gave me two. You don't happen to like frozen yogurt do you? I love it! You're kidding! What a crazy, random happenstance! — Joss Whedon

The logical side of our brain convinces us that these events are all merely coincidences. Pure happenstance. That, The Legend of John Titor, must be wild-eyed fiction. The mind cannot accept any other conclusion as rational. Keep — E.A. Blayre III

Fate' and 'coincidence' are the mythological derivatives authored by those who refuse to see a 'greater purpose', because such a conclusion would naturally suggest a 'Greater Being'. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

Fo' it be so clear to me now, with my family being black an white, that though we blacks have it very hard fo' very long, we don't own suffering. Abuse, slavery, injustice, an tribulation be part of human living. An if there be a question that be worth axing, rather than it be bout white or black, we might be wanting to ax how come it's always us humans who be suffering an be mean to one another. We might want a be axing that instead. From: Accidents of Birth Trilogy — Christina Carson

Design is the application of intent - the opposite of happenstance, and an antidote to accident. — Robert L. Peters

He was The Demon Highlander, elder brother to the Blackheart of Ben More. These monikers, they were not granted by the happenstance of birth or marriage, like a Marquess or an Earl, they were earned by means of ruthless violence and bloodshed. It was easy to forget that fact beneath the grand chandelier of this lofty keep. That was, until the fire in the hearth ignited the amber in his eyes, lending him a ferocity that even his expensive attire couldn't tame. — Kerrigan Byrne

There is law enough all about us
in almanack and season, anniversary
days come round, the round earth's carnivale
of chimes and recessionals.
Good to be included
there. Good also what is not
fixed or sure even,
the second breath of being
here when the May-bush
snows in mid-September, as giddy
happenstance leads us
this way into
a lost one's arms, or that way
deeper into the maze. — David Malouf

Accidents did not just happen. From time to time they were carefully plotted, calculated, and arranged to one's advantage-all, of course, under the cloak of happenstance. — Jodi Picoult

I suppose, all told, I've done more good than evil in my life, but that's incidental, a product of happenstance and the bizarre caprices of the world. — David Brin

The designs of men are notoriously subservient to happenstance, hesitation, and haste; but — Amor Towles

You trip over a word while carrying
a tray of vocabulary out to the pool
only to discover that broken glass
is a good topic. — Billy Collins

In some odd way that you don't understand and can't begin to articulate you feel and acquaintance with it--a familiarity on an unfamiliar level. Somewhere in the deep sediment of your being some long-dormant fragment of primordial memory, some little severed tail of DNA, has twitched or stirred. It is a motion much too faint to be understood or interpreted, but somehow you feel certain that this large, brooding, hypnotic presence has an importance to you at a species level--perhaps even at a sort of tadpole level--and that in some way your visit here is more than happenstance. — Bill Bryson

Sure, kid. Look, there's a very old saying in my family: 'Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is another wizard fucking with you. — Scott Lynch

Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action — Ian Fleming

Try to be happy within the context of the life we are actually living. Happiness is not a situation to be longed for or a convergence of lucky happenstance. Through the power of our own minds, we can help ourselves. — Wayne Coyne

Diane would occasionally find notes he had written. This had happened before. Sometimes it was actually happenstance, and sometimes the faceless old woman who secretly lives in their home would move his notes to where Diane would see them because the faceless old woman was bored and found the troubles of others interesting. Always Diane said she believed in his privacy and always she meant it, but also it always happened that she had read the entire note before she realized what it was. This was not a pattern that she was aware of, but it was one that Josh was very familiar with. — Joseph Fink

No one really can have any idea if it's luck or happenstance or timing or fate or the universe or just smart choices that grant you a good life, a happy one. All we can do is decide to own our choices no matter what, to honor them and ourselves as best we can. That whatever is within our control (and there is plenty that is not) is ours. Mine. Responsibility. Conviction. — Allison Winn Scotch

Most writers are secretly worried that they're not really writers. That it's all been happenstance, something came together randomly, the letters came together, and they won't coalesce ever again. — Nicholson Baker

The best=laid plans, one's most fastidious contingency strategies have revealed themselves in the cold light of day to be laughably inadequate, no match for the happenstance that seems of late only to promise death, mayhem, poverty, flood. And here you are, having spent all that time protecting your home from the oncoming elements only to find that it has been shored up with crackers. — David Rakoff

Yes, Fraulein,' he said to Hannah. 'How gauche of you to have been born in another county. It is almost a capital offense. Here in this house we believe that one must be severely punished for the happenstance of one's birth.' His face was a jester's mask of mockery, but there was a tightness about his eyes, a tense set to his smile. 'What a dilemma for the English, though- we agree with Germany on so many things, including the patent inferiority of anyone who is not US. Darling Mum, did it ever occur to you that to the rest of the world, WE are foreigners?'
'The very idea!' Lady Liripip said with a nervous titter. — Laura L. Sullivan

What they used to call soul. What they used to call spirit. Indivisible, complete, that thing made of mind, distinct from body.
He thought he had one - a soul, a spirit, a nature, an essence. He thought his mind was proof of it.
If mood, facial expression, hunger pain, love of color, if everything human and happenstance came not from the soul, the core of self, but from synapses firing and electrical signals, from the stuff in the brain that could be manipulated and X-rayed, what could he say about himself with any degree of certainty? Was mind just body more refined?
He refused to believe that. — Joshua Ferris

I am placed in situations with opportunities in those situations that others are not. I don't believe that that is happenstance. I believe that there is a God that has a plan for me. — Ronald Perelman

As my father wrote, one's courage, hope, and spirit can be severely tried by the happenstance of life. But as I learned on this Virginia mountain, so long as one never loses faith, it is impossible to ever truly be alone. — David Baldacci

Happenstance and accidents didn't seem so random. The mystery of the connections intrigued him, but he wasn't going to agonize about them, and he had not yet reached an age where he was interested in analyzing them either. He figured that all the threads of his experience would eventually be sewn together, taking shape in harmony and form to create a glorious work of art. But who would sew those pieces together? Who would make him whole? That was something Ciro thought about a lot. Before — Adriana Trigiani

Events," I say to the Captain, "events control our lives, although we have no understanding of them nor do they have any motivation. Everything is blind chance, happenstance, occurrence; in an infinite universe anything can happen. After the fact we find reasons. — Barry N. Malzberg

Innocence is the beginning of ignorance. Experience is the end of stupidity. — Michael Bassey Johnson

In order for you to acquire luck you must be at the right place, in the right time and show the work of your hands, your labor, and your talent. Luck, according to the creator, is not a happenstance or the result of probabilities or numerical factors. I is a function of you creating your own land and being the ruler of your earthly possessions according to a greater purpose. — Celso Cukierkorn

Serendipity is nice, but hoping for luck and the magic of happenstance shouldn't be an excuse for a lack of proactivity. I had to learn for myself that waiting isn't a life plan. — Karen Finerman

But then again, chance has nothing to do with it. Your two fates did not cross through mere happenstance. The two of you set foot in this world because you were meant to enter it. And now that you have entered it, like it or not, each of you will be assigned your proper role here. — Haruki Murakami

All those wasted and squandered years when I did nothing but go around looking inside myself until I ended up alone even though I was surrounded by people. But I paid attention only to what was happenstance about them - not their true selves. — Sigrid Undset

For as is often the happenstance with that which is precious and lost, when you find him again, he may well not be quite as you left him. — Cassandra Clare

This so gnawed at him on some nights that he lay awake wondering just how many unknown and similarly inconsequential accidents and bits of happenstance were at this moment occurring or failing to occur in order to ensure he took his next breath, and the next. — Louise Erdrich

**New business concepts are always, always the product of lucky foresight.**
That's right - the essential insight doesn't come out of any dirigiste planning process; it comes form some cocktail of happenstance, desire, curiosity, ambition and need. But at the end of the day, there has to be a degree of foresight
a sense of where new riches lie. So radical innovation is always one part fortuity and one part clearheaded vision.
[first-line bold by author]
[2002] p.23 — Gary Hamel

We make choices but are constantly foiled by happenstance. — Penelope Lively

We can't afford to stand pat while the world races by. The United States of America did not become the most prosperous nation on Earth by sheer luck or happenstance. We got here because each time a generation of Americans has faced a changing world, we have changed with it. We have not feared our future; we have shaped it. — Barack Obama

By the cold Darwinian logic of natural selection, evolution codifies happenstance into strategy. — David Quammen

Obviously it was happenstance, but it did change my opinion of human nature. I now saw war as a constant, akin to wildfires. They break out unless you work actively to prevent them. It's an atavistic thing, buried deep in our DNA. — Richard Engel

There are moments that define a person's whole life. Moments in which everything they are and everything they may possibly become balance on a single decision. Life and death, hope and despair, victory and failure teeter precariously on the decision made at that moment. These are moments ungoverned by happenstance, untroubled by luck. These are the moments in which a person earns the right to live, or not. — Jonathan Maberry

It takes, unhappily, no more than a desk and writing supplies to turn any room into a confessional. — Thomas Pynchon

The best luck always happens to people who don't need it. — Robert Penn Warren

Mr Bond, they have a saying in Chicago: 'Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it's enemy action'. — Ian Fleming

That's how it was on Irving Circle and how I was raised: You made the best out of what was within reach, which meant friendships engineered by parents and by the happenstance of housing. I stayed with it because we both had queenly older sisters who rarely condescended to play with us, because Shelley was adopted and I was not, because Shelley had Clue and Life, and I did not — Elinor Lipman

It's luck that one thing works out and one doesn't, it's sort of happenstance. — Richard Linklater

Questions are not happenstance thoughts nor are questions common problems of today which one picks up from hearsay and booklearning and decks out with a gesture of profundity questions grow out of confrontation with the subject matter and the subject matter is there only where eyes are, it is in this manner that questions will be posed and all the more considering that questions that have today fallen out of fashion in the great industry of problems. One stands up for nothing more than the normal running of the industry. Philosophy interprets its corruption as the resurrection of metaphysics. — Martin Heidegger