"...the only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

"Sometimes the slightest things change the directions of our lives, the merest breath of a circumstance, a random moment that connects like a meteorite striking the earth. Lives have swiveled and changed direction on the strength of a chance remark."
— Bryce Courtenay

"Anyway, it seems to me that the way most people go on living (I suppose there are a few exceptions), they think that the world of life (or whatever) is this place where everything is (or is supposed to be) basically logical and consistent.... It's like when you put instant rice pudding mix in a bowl in the microwave and push the button, and you take the cover off when it rings, and there you've got rice pudding. I mean, what happens in between the time when you push the switch and when the microwave rings? You can't tell what's going on under the cover. Maybe the instant rice pudding first turns into macaroni gratin in the darkness when nobody's looking and only then turns back into rice pudding. We think it's natural to get rice pudding after we put rice pudding mix in the microwave and the bell rings, but to me that's just a presumption. I would be kind of relieved if, every once in a while, after you put rice pudding mix in the microwave and it rang and you opened the top, you got macaroni gratin."
— Haruki Murakami (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle)

"Most of us are not raised to actively encounter our destiny. We may not know that we have one. As children, we are seldom told we have a place in life that is uniquely ours alone. Instead, we are encouraged to believe that our life should somehow fulfill the expectations of others, that we will (or should) find our satisfactions as they have found theirs. Rather than being taugh to ask ourselves who we are, we are schooled to ask others. We are, in effect, trained to listen to others' versions of ourselves. We are brought up in our life as told to us by someone else! When we survey our lives, seeking to fulfill our creativity, we often see we had a dream that went glimmering because we believed, and those around us believed, that the dream was beyond our reach. Many of us would have been, or at least might have been, done, tried something, if...
If we had known who we really were."
— Julia Cameron

"In the space between chaos and shape there was another chance."
— Jeanette Winterson (The World and Other Places: Stories)

"He held back, with a nervous gleam in his eyes, then took a deep breath. “Wow,” he said, like he was talking to himself. “I never thought I’d have the nerve to admit this, but ...” The short silence seemed way too long. Then, he finally said it: “Alyx, I’m in love with you.”

Holy. Crap.

I think I died for a second. Literally. I had never felt anything like it before. I was incapable of any thought, of any speech. I felt my heart actually stop, before it struggled to start again, slowly at first, until it was pounding like crazy. My mind couldn’t process what I had just heard, or that it was real. It just didn’t seem possible.

I hadn’t been able to say anything yet, and Chance was starting to look hurt. “Um,” he said nervously. “I mean ... It’s okay if you don’t -- if you don’t feel the same way.”

“Chance ...” I managed to say.

“I just thought you should know,” he cut me off.

“I --” I tried again.

“I know that I totally don’t deserve you, and that I probably screwed everything up just now,” he went on. “But it was just too hard not to --”

“Chance! Can you just shut up already so I can tell you that I love you, too?”"
— Injection by Brigid Gorry-Hines

"how can the world in all its chaos come up with so many coincidences, so many similarities and exact opposites?"
— Amy Tan

"Oh, and in case you were dying to know, Chance and I are still ... you know ... together, I guess you could say. I’m not really sure what else to call it.

We told Blaze and Danika maybe two days after we got away from the Injection center. I think they had already seen it coming, because they didn’t seem all that surprised. Blaze’s only reaction was a nod, I guess an approving kind of nod. Dani was really excited and started jumping up and down, squeaking, “Ohmigosh, this is awesome! You guys are going to have such cute babies!”

Awkward silence.

I think she meant way, way in the future. I’m hoping. Ah, well. Danika. Gotta love her."
— Injection by Brigid Gorry-Hines

"Yet, when these facts are seen side by side with other facts in the case, it is difficult not to become lost in superstitious awe. Their very absurdity seems to prohibit the use of the words 'chance' and 'coincidence.' For the sceptic there remains only one consolation: if there should be such a thing as superhuman Law, it is administered with sub-human inefficiency."
— Eric Ambler (A Coffin for Dimitrios)

"Sometimes when you go looking for gold you find it. Sometimes you don't. Sometimes you'll find silver. Sometimes you'll find rocks. And then sometimes there's just the occasional fossil."
— Clara & Mikayla

"All of us, whether or not we are warriors, have a cubic centimeter of chance that pops out in front of our eyes from time to time. The difference between an average man and a warrior is that the warrior is aware of this, and one of his tasks is to be alert, deliberately waiting, so that when his cubic centimeter pops out he has the necessary speed, the prowess, to pick it up."
— Carlos Castaneda

""Bisexuality immediately doubles your chances for a date on a Saturday night.""
— Woody Allen

"I hope they understand that I'm not angry, I'm just saying... Sometimes goodbye is a second chance."
— Shinedown

"The clock holds me nowhere. Nowhere. Nowhere. There is nothing else but now and the shifting depth of the night. I sit at a table alone smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee and listening and surviving. I should not be here or anywhere. I should not be breathing or taking space. I should not have been given this moment or anything else. I should not have this opportunity again to live. I do not deserve it or deserve anything yet it is here and I am here and I Have it all of it still. I won't have it again. This moment or this chance they are the same and they are mine if I choose them and I do. I want them. Now and as long as I can have them they are both precious and fleeting and gone in the blink of an eye don't waste them. A moment and an opportunity and a life, all in the unseen tick of a clock holding me nowhere. My heart is beating. The walls are pale and quiet. I am surviving. "
— James Frey (A Million Little Pieces)

"It has been frequently remarked, that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country to decide, by their conduct and example, the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not, of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend, for their political constitutions, on accident and force."
— Alexander Hamilton (The Federalist Papers)

"He held back, with a nervous gleam in his eyes, then took a deep breath. “Wow,” he said, like he was talking to himself. “I never thought I’d have the nerve to admit this, but ...” The short silence seemed way too long. Then, he finally said it: “Alyx, I’m in love with you.”

Holy. Crap.

I think I died for a second. Literally. I had never felt anything like it before. I was incapable of any thought, of any speech. I felt my heart actually stop, before it struggled to start again, slowly at first, until it was pounding like crazy. My mind couldn’t process what I had just heard, or that it was real. It just didn’t seem possible.

I hadn’t been able to say anything yet, and Chance was starting to look hurt. “Um,” he said nervously. “I mean ... It’s okay if you don’t -- if you don’t feel the same way.”

“Chance ...” I managed to say.

“I just thought you should know,” he cut me off.

“I --” I tried again.

“I know that I totally don’t deserve you, and that I probably screwed everything up just now,” he went on. “But it was just too hard not to --”

“Chance! Can you just shut up already so I can tell you that I love you, too?”"
— Injection by Brigid Gorry Hines

"It's choice - not chance - that determines your destiny. "
— Jean Nidetch

"It was at this time that backgammon was invented and began to be popular. It is a kind of paradigm of how wealth is acquired, which in this world is not the reward of intelligence or ability, just as luck is not a product of skill... If luck favours the player, he gets what he wants; if it doesn't, a skilled and prudent man cannot win that which fortune only bestows on whom it likes. It is thus that the good things of this world are apportioned by chance."
— Al Masudi (From The Meadows of Gold)

"Unable to attribute misfortune to chance, unable to accept their ultimate insignificance within the greater scheme, the people looked for monsters in their midst."
— Bernard Beckett (Genesis)

"a soldier lives always for the next battle, because he knows that before it arrives impossible changes can occur in his favor."
— James A. Michener (Poland)

"Chance is commonly viewed as a self-correcting process in which a deviation in one direction induces a deviation in the opposite direction to restore the equilibrium. In fact, deviations are not "corrected" as a chance process unfolds, they are merely diluted."
— Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman (Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases)

"No one knew what she was doing in Colonia Hidalgo, although it was most likely, according to the police, that she'd been taking a walk and had come upon death purely by chance."
— Roberto Bolaño (2666)

"Chance favors the prepared mind."
— Louis Pasteur

"That was how it was, sometimes. You put yourself in front of the thing and waited for whatever was going to happen and that was all. It scared you and it didn't matter. You stood and faced it. There was no outwitting anything. When Almondine had been playful, she had been playful in the face of that knowledge, as defiant as before the rabid thing. Sometimes you looked the thing in the eye and it turned away. Sometimes it didn't."
— David Wroblewski (The Story of Edgar Sawtelle)