1. You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.
2. You know, Hobbes, some days even my lucky rocket ship underpants don’t help.
3. Remember that sometimes not getting what you want is a wonderful stroke of luck.
4. Shallow men believe in luck or in circumstance. Strong men believe in cause and effect.
5. I’m a greater believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it
6. The sun doesn’t just hang on one family’s tree
7. Scientists have calculated that the chances of something so patently absurd actually existing are millions to one.
But magicians have calculated that million-to-one chances crop up nine times out of ten.
8. I wandered everywhere, through cities and countries wide. And everywhere I went, the world was on my side.
9. “Why hasn’t anyone killed him yet?”
“Dumb luck,” Wit said. “In that I’m lucky you’re all so dumb.
10. Nanny Ogg looked under her bed in case there was a man there. Well, you never knew your luck.
11. Sean reaches between us and slides a thin bracelet of red ribbons over my free hand. Lifting my arm, he presses his lips against the inside of my wrist. I’m utterly still; I feel my pulse tap several times against his lips, and then he releases my hand.
“For luck,” he says. He takes Dove’s lead from me.
“Sean,” I say, and he turns. I take his chin and kiss his lips, hard. I’m reminded, all of a sudden, of that first day on the beach, when I pulled his head from the water.
“For luck,” I say to his startled face.”
12. Life is full of luck, like getting dealt a good hand, or simply by being in the right place at the right time. Some people get luck handed to them, a second chance, a save. It can happen heroically, or by a simple coincidence , but there are those who don’t get luck on a shiny platter, who end up in the wrong place at the wrong time, who don’t get saved.
13. And then, as if written by the hand of a bad novelist, an incredible thing happened.
14. Luck has a way of evaporating when you lean on it.
15. Oh, but you must travel through those woods again and again… said a shadow at the window… and you must be lucky to avoid the wolf every time…
But the wolf… the wolf only needs enough luck to find you once.
16. It takes only a split second for life to go horribly wrong. To fix the mess, I need a thousand things to go right. The distance from one bit of luck to the next feels as great as the distance across oceans. But, I decide in this moment, I will bridge that distance, again and again, until I win. I will not fail.
17. In Madeleine’s face was a stupidity Mitchell had never seen before. It was the stupidity of all normal people. It was the stupidity of the fortunate and the beautiful, of everybody who got what they wanted in life and so remained unremarkable.
18. There is strange comfort in knowing that no matter what happens today, the Sun will rise again tomorrow.
19. Here’s the thing about luck…you don’t know if it’s good or bad until you have some perspective.
20. Ability is of little account without opportunity.
21. Since Alice had never received any religious instruction, and since she had led a blameless life, she never thought of her awful luck as being anything but accidents in a very busy place. Good for her.
22. Luck?” Drizzt replied. “Perhaps. But more often, I dare to say, luck is simply the advantage a true warrior gains in excuting the correct course of action.
23. The struggles we endure today will be the ‘good old days’ we laugh about tomorrow.
24. Nearly’ only counts in horseshoes and hand-grenades.
25. He was just a coward and that was the worst luck any many could have.
26. The fish is my friend too…I have never seen or heard of such a fish. But I must kill him. I am glad we do not have to try to kill the stars. Imagine if each day a man must try to kill the moon, he thought. The moon runs away. But imagine if a man each day should have to try to kill the sun? We were born lucky; he thought
27. Concentration attracts luck factor.
28. What do you think my chances might be of finding a soul mate in the group of you? I’ll be lucky if I can just find someone who’ll be able to stand me for the rest of our lives. What if I’ve already sent her home because I was relying on some sort of spark I didn’t feel? What if she’s waiting to leave me at the first sign of adversity? What if I don’t find anyone at all? What do I do then, America?
29. Risk means ‘shit happens’ or ‘good luck
30. Some luck lies in not getting what you thought you wanted but getting what you have, which once you have it you may be smart enough to see is what you would have wanted had you known.
31. Life is not easy. We all have problems-even tragedies-to deal with, and luck has nothing to do with it. Bad luck is only the superstitious excuse for those who don’t have the wit to deal with the problems of life.
32. And then it occurs to me. They are frightened. In me, they see their own daughters, just as ignorant, just as unmindful of all the truths and hopes they have brought to America. They see daughters who grow impatient when their mothers talk in Chinese, who think they are stupid when they explain things in fractured English. They see that joy and luck do not mean the same to their daughters, that to these closed American-born minds “joy luck” is not a word, it does not exist. They see daughters who will bear grandchildren born without any connecting hope passed from generation to generation.
33. People always call it luck when you’ve acted more sensibly than they have.
34. Most young women do not welcome promiscuous advances. (Either that, or my luck’s terrible.)
35. Nobody knows anything…… Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out it’s a guess and, if you’re lucky, an educated one.
36. Sometimes not getting what you want is a brilliant stroke of luck.
37. It’s a question of attitude. If you really work at something you can do it up to a point. If you really work at being happy you can do it up to a point. But anything more than that you can’t. Anything more than that is luck.
38. Life’s trials will test you, and shape you, but don’t let them change who you are.
39. When ill luck begins, it does not come in sprinkles, but in showers.
40. It’s in those quiet little towns, at the edge of the world, that you will find the salt of the earth people who make you feel right at home.
41. There’s always the same amount of good luck and bad luck in the world. If one person doesn’t get the bad luck, somebody else will have to get it in their place. There’s always the same amount of good and evil, too. We can’t eradicate evil, we can only evict it, force it to move across town. And when evil moves, some good always goes with it. But we can never alter the ratio of good to evil. All we can do is keep things stirred up so neither good nor evil solidifies. That’s when things get scary. Life is like a stew, you have to stir it frequently, or all the scum rises to the top.
42. Only I have no luck any more. But who knows? Maybe today. Every day is a new day. It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready.
43. All the luck in the world has to come every year, in every part of every year, or there is not a harvest and then the luck, the bad luck will come and everything we are, all that we can ever be, all the Einsteins and babies and love and hate, all the joy and sadness and sex and wanting and liking and disliking, all the soft summer breezes on cheeks and first snowflakes, all the Van Goghs and Rembrandts and Mozarts and Mahlers and Thomas Jeffersons and Lincolns and Ghandis and Jesus Christs, all the Cleopatras and lovemaking and riches and achievements and progress, all of that, every single damn thing that we are or ever will be is dependent on six inches of topsoil and the fact that the rain comes when it’s needed and does not come when it is not needed; everything, every…single…thing comes with that luck.
44. There are, he assures her, no such things as curses. There is luck, maybe, bad or good. A slight inclination of each day towards success or failure. But no curses.
45. There were a group of people before the Ascension known as the Astalsi. They claimed that each person was born with a certain finite amount of ill luck. And so, when an unfortunate event happened, they thought themselves blessed—thereafter, their lives could only get better.
46. They had parted as boys, and now life presented one of them with a fugitive and the other with a dying man. Both wondered whether this was due to the cards they’d been dealt or to the way they had played them.
47. From this point forward, you don’t even know how to quit in life.
48. Those who achieve the extraordinary are usually the most ordinary because they have nothing to prove to anybody. Be Humble.
49. That is life, isn’t it? Fate. Luck. Chance. A long series of what-if’s that lead from one moment to the next, time never pausing for you to catch your breath, to make sense of the cards that have been handed to you. And all you can do is play your cards and hope for the best, because in the end, it all comes back to those three basics.
Fate. Luck. Chance.
50. With a library it is easier to hope for serendipity than to look for a precise answer.
51. When life gets you down, improvise as if crawling was part of the choreography.
52. There’s always a siren, singing you to shipwreck. Some of us may be more susceptible than others are, but there’s always a siren. It may be with us all our lives, or it may be many years or decades before we find it or it finds us. But when it does find us, if we’re lucky we’re Odysseus tied up to the ship’s mast, hearing the song with perfect clarity, but ferried to safety by a crew whose ears have been plugged with beeswax. If we’re not at all lucky, we’re another sort of sailor stepping off the deck to drown in the sea.
53. I’ve found that what most people call luck is often little more than raw talent combined with the ability to make the most of opportunities. (Talon Karrde)
54. The fairies, as their custom, clapped their hands with delight over their cleverness, and they were so madly in love with the little house that they could not bear to think they had finished it.
55. In the abstract, it might be tempting to imagine that irreducible complexity simply requires multiple simultaneous mutations – that evolution might be far chancier than we thought, but still possible. Such an appeal to brute luck can never be refuted… Luck is metaphysical speculation; scientific explanations invoke causes.
56. This was how it was with travel: one city gives you gifts, another robs you. One gives you the heart’s affections, the other destroys your soul. Cities and countries are as alive and feeling, as fickle and uncertain as people. Their degrees of love and devotion are as varying as with any human relation. Just as one is good, another is bad.
57. Trust your luck, Taran Wanderer. But don’t forget to put out your nets!
58. I am a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it
59. Mother Mary of Anabolic Grace, we got Teras incoming?” He levels angry blue eyes on me. “You’re a hex, lady, dark luck, powerful bad juju, ken?”
“Only to people who try to kidnap me,” I tell him sweetly, and March snorts, so I feel obliged to add, “Or rescue me…” And then Dina makes a pfft sound. “Or who travel with me…” My gaze sweeps around the darkened interior, trying to find an ally, but nobody will hold my eyes more than two seconds, it seems. “Fine, frag you all, I’m dark juju, bad luck, and you’re all doomed.
60. We are all a great deal luckier that we realize, we usually get what we want – or near enough.
