“It was totally unrealistic to think that because there had been wildly unlikely coincidences in the immediate past, that there would be more wildly unlikely ones turning up in orderly succession. Yet…”

“Simply ask & answer: if we were being wildly successful in fulfilling our purpose, what would it look, sound, & feel like? #SmallBizChat”

“By the laws of statistics we could probably approximate just how unlikely it is that it would happen. But people forget—especially those who ought to know better, such as yourself—that while the laws of statistics tell you how unlikely a particular coincidence is, they state just as firmly that coincidences do happen.”

“When we think about the present, we veer wildly between the belief in chance and the evidence in favour of determinism. When we think about the past, however, it seems obvious that everything happened in the way that it was intended.”

“Many things we misread as meaningful are quite ordinary coincidences. For example, it’s not unlikely that occasionally someone will phone you after you’ve been thinking about them. But we give these things value to make sense of our lives.”

“Villari took no notice of them because the idea of a coincidence between art and reality was alien to him. Unlike people who read novels, he never saw himself as a character in a work of art.”

“Can't repeat the past?" he cried incredulously. "Why of course you can!"
He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.”

“Unlike previous environmental changes, the electric media constitutes a total and near-instanteous transformation of culture, values and attitudes.”

“I think all my movies are commercial. That's my delusion. I thought 'Naked Lunch' was wildly entertaining, so what do I know?”

“If you continue to visualize things in the past, you are unlikely to make much progress in the present and the future.”