“When seasoned by the subtleties of accident, harmony, favor, wisdom, and inevitability, luck takes on the cast of serendipity. Serendipity happens when a well-trained mind looking for one things encounters something else: the unexpected.”
“Not to extinguish our free will, I hold it to be true that Fortune is the arbiter of one-half of our actions, but that she still leaves us to direct the other half.”
“Poor gosling. It hurts to be lost. And worse to be home with no kind of homecoming. You’re my good-luck bird, Jok. I’ll be lucky if I can do as well as you when this is all done, just a bit out of breath, a bit bruised and scratched, a bit wiser and sadder for it all.”
“Don’t be confused by what looks like luck to you. Lucky people don’t make successful people; people who completely commit themselves to success seem to get lucky in life.”
“Everyone in his family had always liked the fact that “Stanley Yelnats” was spelled the same frontward and backward. So they kept naming their sons Stanley. Stanley was an only child, as was every other Stanley Yelnats before him.
All of them had something else in common. Despite their awful luck, they always remained hopeful. As Stanley’s father liked to say, “I learn from failure.”
But perhaps that was part of the curse as well. If Stanley and his father weren’t always hopeful, then it wouldn’t hurt so much every time their hopes were crushed.”
“People think they know what they want but they generally don’t. Sometimes if they’re lucky they’ll get it anyways. Me I was always lucky. My whole life. I wouldn’t be here otherwise.”
“Great criminals bear about them a kind of predestination which makes them surmount all obstacles, which makes them escape all dangers, till the moment which a wearied Providence has marked as the rock for their impious fortunes.”
″‘So we decided to hold parties and pretend each week had become the new year. Each week we could forget past wrongs done to us. We weren’t allowed to think a bad thought. We feasted, we laughed, we played games, lost and won, we told the best stories. And each week, we could hope to be lucky. That hope was our only joy. And that’s how we came to call our little parties Joy Luck.‘”
“Accumulating love brings luck, accumulating hatred brings calamity. Anyone who fails to recognize problems leaves the door open for tragedies to rush in.”
“Leigh Anne listened to the doctors discuss how bizarrely lucky Sean Junior had been in his collision with the airbag. Then she went back home and relayed the conversation to Michael, who held out his arm. An ugly burn mark ran right down the fearsome length of it. ‘I stopped it,’ he said.”
“Some men are born to good luck: all they do or try to do comes right—all that falls to them is so much gain— all their geese are swans— all their cards are trumps— toss them which way you will, they will always, like poor puss, alight upon their legs, and only move on so much the faster. The world may very likely not always think of them as they think of themselves, but what care they for the world? what can it know about the matter?”
“It’s like many other things in life, Ellie. You keep on the path and all’s well. You get off it and the next thing you know you’re lost if you’re not lucky.”
“ ‘Luck, good or bad,’ said Rumfoord up in his treetop, ‘is not the hand of God.’
‘Luck,’ said Rumfoord up in his treetop, ‘is the way the wind swirls and the dust settles eons after God has passed by.’ ”
“I looked at Natividad who sat a short distance away, on spread out sleepsacks, playing with her baby and talking to Zahra. She had been lucky. Did she know? How many other people were less lucky—unable to escape the master’s attentions or gain the mistress’s sympathies. How far did masters and mistresses go these days toward putting less than submissive servants in their places?”
″ ‘What a lucky day this is!’ thought Sylvester. ‘From now on I can have everything I want. My father and mother can have anything they want. My relatives, my friends, and anybody at all can have everything anybody wants!’ ”
“I don’t know about luck, you young -er- but it’s brought me the best morning’s entertainment since General Patton got trod on by the regimental drummer’s horse.”
“It is easy in a moment like this to want to speak over this woman, to tell Tia there is nothing more we can do, to say out loud the woman is lucky that her lungs still draw breath. But I learned young, you do not speak of the dying as if they are already dead.”
“I felt rotten today. It’s my mother’s fault for singing “My Way” at two o’clock in the morning at the top of the stairs. Just my luck to have a mother like her. There is a chance my parents could be alcoholics. Next year I could be in a children’s home.”
“Must we turn to the anthropic principle for an explanation? Was it all just a lucky chance? That would seem a counsel of despair, a negation of all our hopes of understanding the underlying order of the universe.”
“My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had.”
“Everything which she has about her is of gold - tables, chairs, dishes, glasses, bowls, and household furniture. Among your treasures are five tons of gold; let one of the goldsmiths fo the kingdom fashion these into all manner of vessels and utensils, into all kinds of birds, wild beasts and strange animals, such as may please her, and we will go there with them and try our luck.”
“what is the reason that makes some days so lucky and other days so unlucky? Now, today began all wrong, and everything that happened in it was wrong, and on other days it begins right, and all goes right, straight through.”
″ ‘What must be, must be. The luck of the house hangs on that clock. Its maker spent a good part of his life over it, and his last words were that it would bring good luck to the house that owned it, but that trouble would follow its silence. It’s my belief,’ she added solemnly, ‘that it’s a fairy clock, neither more nor less, for good luck it has brought there’s no denying.’ ”
“But a man-thing in their hands is in no good luck. They grow tired of the nuts they pick, and throw them down. They carry a branch half a day, meaning to do great things with it, and then they snap it in two. That man-thing is not to be envied. They called me also—`yellow fish’ was it not?”
“You were far too happy. When a woman marries again, it is because she detested her first husband. When a man marries again, it is because he adored his first wife. Women try their luck; men risk theirs.”