Pure Luck Quotes

I had on a beautiful red dress, but what I saw was even more valuable. I was strong. I was pure. I had genuine thoughts inside that no one could see, that no one could ever take away from me. I was like the wind. -Lindo

If a life can be ruined in a single moment, a moment of betrayal, or violence, or ill luck, then why can a life not also be saved, be worth living, be made, by just a few pure moments of perfection?

A person's birthday should be a special day, a wonderful day, a day of pure celebration for the luck of being born!

Let me tell you about love, that silly word you believe is about whether you like somebody or whether somebody likes you or whether you can put up with somebody in order to get something or someplace you want or you believe it has to do with how your body responds to another body like robins or bison or maybe you believe love is how forces or nature or luck is benign to you in particular not maiming or killing you but if so doing it for your own good. Love is none of that. There is nothing in nature like it. Not in robins or bison or in the banging tails of your hunting dogs and not in blossoms or suckling foal. Love is divine only and difficult always. If you think it is easy you are a fool. If you think it is natural you are blind. It is a learned application without reason or motive except that it is God. You do not deserve love regardless of the suffering you have endured. You do not deserve love because somebody did you wrong. You do not deserve love just because you want it. You can only earn - by practice and careful contemplations - the right to express it and you have to learn how to accept it. Which is to say you have to earn God. You have to practice God. You have to think God-carefully. And if you are a good and diligent student you may secure the right to show love. Love is not a gift. It is a diploma. A diploma conferring certain privileges: the privilege of expressing love and the privilege of receiving it. How do you know you have graduated? You don't. What you do know is that you are human and therefore educable, and therefore capable of learning how to learn, and therefore interesting to God, who is interested only in Himself which is to say He is interested only in love. Do you understand me? God is not interested in you. He is interested in love and the bliss it brings to those who understand and share the interest. Couples that enter the sacrament of marriage and are not prepared to go the distance or are not willing to get right with the real love of God cannot thrive. They may cleave together like robins or gulls or anything else that mates for life. But if they eschew this mighty course, at the moment when all are judged for the disposition of their eternal lives, their cleaving won't mean a thing. God bless the pure and holy. Amen.

One hundred idiots make idiotic plans and carry them out. All but one justly fail. The hundredth idiot, whose plan succeeded through pure luck, is immediately convinced he’s a genius.

I think today will be the day. Today our luck will change,' I proclaimed on the wings of the first coffee of the day, pure optimism in a liquid state.

Nothing except luck protects you from catastrophe. Not love. Not money. Not faith. Not a pure heart or good deeds--and not bad ones either, for that matter. We can, any of us, be laid low, cut down, diminished, destroyed.

People break down into two groups. When they experience something lucky, group number one sees it as more than luck, more than coincidence. They see it as a sign, evidence, that there is someone up there, watching out for them. Group number two sees it as just pure luck. Just a happy turn of chance. I'm sure the people in group number two are looking at those fourteen lights in a very suspicious way. For them, the situation is a fifty-fifty. Could be bad, could be good. But deep down, they feel that whatever happens, they're on their own. And that fills them with fear. Yeah, there are those people. But there's a whole lot of people in group number one. When they see those fourteen lights, they're looking at a miracle. And deep down, they feel that whatever's going to happen, there will be someone there to help them. And that fills them with hope. See what you have to ask yourself is what kind of person are you? Are you the kind that sees signs, that sees miracles? Or do you believe that people just get lucky? Or, look at the question this way: Is it possible that there are no coincidences?

And every one of these events is connected. But not by luck: it's pure cause and effect.

Scholars discern motions in history & formulate these motions into rules that govern the rises & falls of civilizations. My belief runs contrary, however. To wit: history admits no rules; only outcomes. What precipitates outcomes? Vicious acts & virtuous acts. What precipitates acts? Belief. Belief is both prize & battlefield, within the mind & in the mind’s mirror, the world. If we believe humanity is a ladder of tribes, a colosseum of confrontation, exploitation & bestiality, such a humanity is surely brought into being, & history's Horroxes, Boerhaaves & Gooses shall prevail. You & I, the moneyed, the privileged, the fortunate, shall not fare so badly in this world, provided our luck holds. What of it if our consciences itch? Why undermine the dominance of our race, our gunships, our heritage & our legacy? Why fight the “natural” (oh, weaselly word!) order of things? Why? Because of this:—one fine day, a purely predatory world shall consume itself. Yes, the devil shall take the hindmost until the foremost is the hindmost. In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul. For the human species, selfishness is extinction. Is this the doom written within our nature? If we believe that humanity may transcend tooth & claw, if we believe divers races & creeds can share this world as peaceably as the orphans share their candlenut tree, if we believe that leaders must be just, violence muzzled, power accountable & the riches of the Earth & its Oceans shared equitably, such a world will come to pass. I am not deceived. It is the hardest of worlds to make real. Torturous advances won over generations can be lost by a single stroke of a myopic president’s pen or a vainglorious general’s sword. A life spent shaping a world I want Jackson to inherit, not one I fear Jackson shall inherit, this strikes me as a life worth the living.

Peter! Were you looking for a horse-shoe?" "No; I was expecting the horse, but the shoe is a piece of pure, gorgeous luck." "And observation. I found it." "You did. And I could kiss you for it. You need not shrink and tremble. I am not going to do it. When I kiss you, it will be an important event -- one of those things which stand out among their surroundings like the first time you tasted li-chee. It will not be an unimportant sideshow attached to a detective investigation.

Not all of us receive the ends that we deserve. Many moments that change a life's course - a conversation with a stranger on a ship, for example - are pure luck. And yet no one writes you a letter, or chooses you as their confessor, without good reason. This is what she taught me: you have to be ready in order to be lucky. You have to put your pieces into play.

She had too much imagination. Too much empathy [...] there was real pain in the world, right this very moment people were suffering unimaginable atrocities and you couldn't close your heart completely, but you couldn't leave it wide open either, because otherwise how could you possibly live your life, when through pure, random luck you got to live in paradise?

How did you...?" "Stay together?" I nodded. "Persistence, I suppose, and pure dumb luck." "Huh." "And a little magic." "I'm sorry?" "The magic of being needed by just one person.

But a year in jail for an innocent man is pure luck in our system.

Although it was pure luck that the book Improvement of the Mind fell into his hands, it took someone with such focus to recognize immediately its worth and exploit

the world, right this very moment people were suffering unimaginable atrocities and you couldn’t close your heart completely, but you couldn’t leave it wide open either, because otherwise how could you possibly live your life, when through pure, random luck you got to live in paradise? You had to register the existence of evil, do the little that you could, and then close your mind and think about new shoes.

Lucy, I’ve been meaning to say: that was an impressive move back there – what you did with the rapier.’ ‘Thanks.’ ‘You aimed it perfectly, right between their heads. An inch to the left, and you’d have skewered George right between the eyes. Really sensational accuracy there.’ I made a modest gesture. ‘Well . . . sometimes you just do what has to be done.’ ‘You didn’t actually aim it at all, did you?’ Lockwood said. ‘No.’ ‘You just chucked it. In fact, it was pure blind luck that George lost his balance and fell out of the way. That’s why he wasn’t kebabbed by you.’ ‘Yup.

Not having money isn't a personal failing. Having it is almost always an accident of birth or pure luck. I understand that not being able to pay for things feels like a failure, but it isn't. You haven't done anything wrong.

I bet you didn’t have to say a word. I bet those rings were all Ty. Which makes you the only female on the planet who didn’t have to give her man some instruction when it came to an engagement ring,” Krystal noted correctly and I looked down at her. “He may drink beer but that boy is pure champagne.

I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing truly what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things were which produced the emotion that you experienced. In writing for a newspaper you told what happened and, with one trick and another, you communicated the emotion aided by the element of timeliness which gives a certain emotion to any account of something that has happened on that day; but the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or in ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always, was beyond me and I was working very hard to try to get it.

But this? Pure serendipity. And maybe that made it the most precious thing of all because it could so easily not have happened. Maybe, once chance plays so big a part in your life, you realize more is out of your control that you'd like to think.

He was obsessed with the fear of making a mistake. Sometimes he was convinced it was impossible to do anything else, and that if anyone got anything right it was purely by chance.

Communicating with a toddler is a little like being in a foreign country. You both know a few words in common and the rest is gesturing and pure luck.

The price must be paid if you want to go beyond mediocrity. Simply put, pure luck does not exist. It's about planning and doing. Nothing happens by chance.

Because money is all things (or can be all things), something strange happens to the person who has it. As Marx says, it's like someone finding, by pure chance, the philosopher's stone. You know the philosopher's stone?" "Yes, I know what the philosopher's stone is." "The philosopher's stone gives you all the knowledge. All of it. All the knowledge of all the sciences. Imagine that someone just finds this stone. By luck. Suddenly he would have all this knowledge, regardless of his individuality. Even if he's a perfect idiot. All of it. All the knowledge.

there was real pain in the world, right this very moment people were suffering unimaginable atrocities and you couldn’t close your heart completely, but you couldn’t leave it wide open either, because otherwise how could you possibly live your life, when through pure, random luck you got to live in paradise? You

To say that I fell into this love suggests a series of coincidences or just pure luck that takes away from the responsibility of my choice. For if our days are long or our nights bleak, when life springs unpleasant surprises along our way, I will remember that loving you was my choice. I will remember that love is much more than intense feelings. For feelings can be fickle and change so swiftly just in the course of one day. Know this then, my love. Know that this choice to forever link my life with yours was mine alone to make. With eyes wide open and clear, in the presence of God, our families, and our friends, I choose to spend the rest of my life with you and with you alone.

I'll be your daily Orator to pray that that pure sanguine complexion of yours may never be famished with pot-lucke, that you may taste till your last gasp, and live to see the confusion of both your special enemies, Small Beer and Grammar rules.

The fact that he got to save the Gwardian's mate and managed to piss him off at the same time, well that was just a bonus and pure luck of circumstance. After all, he had gypsy blood inside of him and could not stop the satisfaction he got from pissing people off.

The source of my name,” the vessel had replied, “The Hundredth Idiot, is a quotation: ‘One hundred idiots make idiotic plans and carry them out. All but one justly fail. The hundredth idiot, whose plan succeeded through pure luck, is immediately convinced he’s a genius.

Still, injuring Venka was no easy task. More by sheer luck than anything, Rin managed to land a blow early on in the match. Venka, underestimating Rin’s speed, had brought her guard back up too slowly after an attempted left hook. Rin took the opening and whipped a backhand through at Venka’s nose. Bone broke under Rin’s fist with an audible crack. Venka immediately retreated. One hand flew to her face, groping around her swelling nose. She glanced down at her blood-covered fingers and then back up at Rin. Her nostrils flared. Her cheeks turned a ghastly white. “Problem?” Rin asked. The look Venka gave her was pure murder. “You shouldn’t even be here,” she snarled. “Tell that to your nose,” Rin said.

Life presents twists and turns, and there comes a point where you have no clue if you should turn left or right. It is pure luck or fate, and of course, let’s not forget the only one who takes the blame, God! God wants this to happen, it’s all God’s plan to direct you to something better.

Happiness is an emotion based on positive circumstances within our lives. The origin of the word “happiness” was derived from the same root “hap”, similar to the word “happening.” Depending on what's happening in our lives, we're either happy or sad. It's based on pure luck and good fortune.

But I still state unhesitatingly, that for pure, vacillating stupidity, for superb incompetence to command, for ignorance combined with bad judgment --in short, for the true talent for catastrophe -- Elphy Bey stood alone. Others abide our question, but Elphy outshines them all as the greatest military idiot of our own or any other day. Only he could have permitted the First Afghan War and let it develop to such ruinous defeat. It was not easy: he started with a good army, a secure position, some excellent officers, a disorganized enemy, and repeated opportunities to save the situation. But Elphy, with the touch of true genius, swept aside these obstacles with unerring precision, and out of order wrought complete chaos. We shall not, with luck, look upon his like again.

Were you serious when you said I might win someday at Wimbledon?" Claire answered, "There's so much that's pure luck, good or bad. The weather can be terrible. We always say we should re-schedule Wimbledon and hold it in the summer!" I frowned. "Wimbledon is in the summer." Claire sighed. "It's a joke, Fiona." "Oh.

Fate is the excuse people use to justify when life-altering things happen, when in reality it’s the result of the decisions they make—and maybe a dash of pure dumb luck. Good or bad, people’s actions determine their future. Cause and effect. Action, reaction. Blaming things on fate only downplays the importance of choice.

So much beauty in your being, Surely you are an angel sent down to me. Such warm eyes as you regard me, Surely to draw me into your pure heart. Such sweetness in your voice, Surely must be Heaven made. Such a tender embrace, Surely to offer me His strength in your arms. Such soft lips, Surely offering God's love. Such kindness, Surely to remind me be true. Such luck I have at Heaven sitting beside me, Surely to assure me of my Earthly duties as a man. Such amazing beauty, I see in you. Kate.”   I

Thus, lacking the necessary follow-through required for sustained success, pure Jupiterian energy will not succeed. It can translate to a case of easy come, easy go. On the other hand, pure Saturnian energy would struggle without Fortune’s favor. Here we will see diligent people beset with trials and tribulations, one after another.

I've fought off groups before and making it out in one piece was pure dumb luck. That's it. These days it feels like alive is an accidental state of being.

Circumstantial moral luck is 'luck in one’s circumstances - the kind of problems and situations one faces'.

Drinking before football is going to be 95% of my strategy. And the other 5%? 1% pure, unadulterated athletic talent. 4% luck.

A vitamin is a substance that makes you ill if you don’t eat it. —Albert Szent-Györgyi, chemist

My point is that if you are not careful, if you are not smart, you will find yourself giving up pieces of your soul before it’s too late. You will wind up dead.” “And?” She stilled. “How can you ask that so cavalierly?” He shrugged. “I’m nobody,” he said. It was the truth. Everything he was, the worth by which the world defined him…it had all been given to him. By pure luck of being born into the “right” family.

She had too much imagination. Too much empathy. That’s what Madeline had been trying to explain to Bonnie at assembly that morning. Those little girls were completely real to Abigail, and of course, they were real, there was real pain in the world, right this very moment people were suffering unimaginable atrocities and you couldn’t close your heart completely, but you couldn’t leave it wide open either, because otherwise how could you possibly live your life, when through pure, random luck you got to live in paradise? You had to register the existence of evil, do the little that you could, and then close your mind and think about new shoes. “So

Nothing except luck protects you from catastrophe. Not love. Not money. Not faith. Not a pure heart or good deeds—and not bad ones either, for that matter. We can, any of us, be laid low, cut down, diminished, destroyed.

Constitutive moral luck occurs whenever forces beyond your control have shaped 'the kind of person you are, where this is not just a question of what you deliberately do, but of your inclinations, capacities, and temperament'.

La mala racha" Mientras dura la mala racha pierdo todo. Se me caen las cosas de los bolsillos y de la memoria: pierdo llaves. lapiceras, dinero, documentos, nombres, caras, palabras. Yo no se si será gualicho de alguien que me quiere mal y me piensa peor, o pura casualidad, pero a veces el bajón demora en irse y yo ando de pérdida en pérdida, pierdo lo que encuentro, no encuentro lo que busco, y siento mucho miedo de que se me caiga la vida en alguna distracción. "When Luck Runs Out” During streaks of bad luck, I lose everything. Things fall out of my pockets and my memory: I lose keys, pens, money, documents, names, faces, words. I don’t know whether someone wishes me harm and has put the evil eye on me or whether it’s pure happenstance, but sometimes this slump just won’t end and I lose one thing after another. I lose what I find, I can’t find what I’m looking for, and I’m quite afraid of losing life through some little hole in my pocket.” Eduardo Galeano: El libro de los abrazos (The Book of Embraces)

-The Wonderer's Dream- Upon one lucky night I had a vision A vision of a tree whose roots grew Wide Deep and Long And I followed it down until it lead me to another world And in this world I learned there were worlds upon worlds A world in which there was no slave or free As there was nothing to be free from This world was made of pure light A light that radiates In you In me And on the rare occasion it finds itself travelled and distant and somehow, as luck may have it, in our world. A poem for the Nalia Books

I wiped my eyes and looked in the mirror. I was surprised at what I saw. I had on a beautiful red dress, but what I saw was even more valuable. I was strong. I was pure. I had genuine thoughts inside that no one could see, that no one could ever take away from me. I was like the wind.

Pre-eminent amongst Rincewind's talents was his skill in running away, which over the years he had elevated to the status of a genuinely pure science; it didn't matter if you were fleeing from or to, so long as you were fleeing. It was flight alone that counted. I run, therefore I am; more correctly, I run, therefore with any luck I'll still be.

Scholars discern motions in history & formulate these motions into rules that govern the rises & falls of civilizations. My belief runs contrary, however. To wit: history admits no rules, only outcomes. What precipitates outcomes? Vicious acts & virtuous acts. What precipitates acts? Belief. Belief is both prize & battlefield, within the mind & in the mind's mirror, the world. If we believe humanity is a ladder of tribes, a colosseum of confrontation, exploitation & bestiality, such a humanity is surely brought into being, & history's Horroxes, Boerhaaves & Gooses shall prevail. You & I, the moneyed, the privileged, the fortunate, shall not fare so badly in this world, provided our luck holds. What of it if our consciences itch? Why undermine the dominance of our race, our gunships, our heritage & our legacy? Why fight the 'natural' (oh, weaselly word!) order of things? Why? Because of this: -- one fine day, a purely predatory world shall consume itself. Yes, the devil shall take the hindmost until the foremost is the hindmost. In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction. Is this the entropy written in our nature? If we believe that humanity may transcend tooth & claw, if we believe divers [sic] races & creeds can share this world as peaceably as the orphans share their candlenut tree, if we believe leaders must be just, violence muzzled, power accountable & the riches of the Earth & its Oceans shared equitably, such a world will come to pass. I am not deceived. It is the hardest of worlds to make real. Tortuous advances won over generations can be lost by a single stroke of a myopic president's pen or a vainglorious general's sword. A life spent shaping a world I want Jackson to inherit, not one I fear Jackson shall inherit, this strikes me as a life worth the living. Upon my return to San Francisco, I shall pledge myself to the Abolitionist cause, because I owe my life to a self-freed slave & because I must begin somewhere. I hear my father-in-law's response. 'Oho, fine, Whiggish sentiments, Adam. But don't tell me about justice! Ride to Tennessee on an ass & convince the red-necks that they are merely white-washed negroes & their negroes are black-washed Whites! Sail to the Old World, tell 'em their imperial slaves' rights are as inalienable as the Queen of Belgium's! Oh, you'll grow hoarse, poor & grey in caucuses! You'll be spat on, shot at, lynched, pacified with medals, spurned by backwoodsmen! Crucified! Naïve, dreaming Adam. He who would do battle with the many-headed hydra of human nature must pay a world of pain & his family must pay along with him! & only as you gasp your dying breath shall you understand, your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean!' Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?

Additionally, there is good evidence that people particularly hate mistakes of their own making. The world is fraught with uncertainties, many of which people have no control over. These vagaries make them unhappy, but perhaps not as unhappy as making an active choice that ends up, purely as a result of bad luck, making them worse off than if they had done nothing.

I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing truly what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things were which produced the emotion that you experienced. In writing for a newspaper you told what happened and, with one trick and another, you communicated the emotion aided by the element of timeliness which gives a certain emotion to any account of something that has happened on that day; but the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or in ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always, was beyond me and I was working very hard to get it.

If ever again we happened to lose our balance, just when sleepwalking through the same dream on the brink of hell’s valley, if ever the magical mare (whom I ride through the night air hollowed out into caverns and caves where wild animals live) in a crazy fit of anger over some word I might have said without the perfect sweetness that works on her like a charm, if ever the magic Mare looks over her shoulder and whinnies: “So! You don’t love me!” and bucks me off, sends me flying to the hyenas, if ever the paper ladder that I climb so easily to go pick stars for Promethea—at the very instant that I reach out my hand and it smells like fresh new moon, so good, it makes you believe in god’s genius—if ever at that very instant my ladder catches fire—because it is so fragile, all it would take is someone’s brushing against it tactlessly and all that would be left is ashes—if ever I had the dreadful luck again to find myself falling screaming down into the cruel guts of separation, and emptying all my being of hope, down to the last milligram of hope, until I am able to melt into the pure blackness of the abyss and be no more than night and a death rattle, I would really rather not be tumbling around without my pencil and paper.

But I’ll never forget. On the day of the Festival of Pure Brightness, I take off all my bracelets. I remember the day when I finally knew a genuine thought and could follow where it went. That was the day I was a young girl with my face under a red marriage scarf. I promised not to forget myself. How nice it is to be that girl again, to take off my scarf, to see what is underneath and feel the lightness come back into my body!

there was real pain in the world, right this very moment people were suffering unimaginable atrocities and you couldn’t close your heart completely, but you couldn’t leave it wide open either, because otherwise how could you possibly live your life, when through pure, random luck you got to live in paradise? You had to register the existence of evil, do the little that you could, and then close your mind and think about new shoes.

What, in fact, do we know about the peak experience? Well, to begin with, we know one thing that puts us several steps ahead of the most penetrating thinkers of the 19th century: that P.E’.s are not a matter of pure good luck or grace. They don’t come and go as they please, leaving ‘this dim, vast vale of tears vacant and desolate’. Like rainbows, peak experiences are governed by definite laws. They are ‘intentional’. And that statement suddenly gains in significance when we remember Thorndike’s discovery that the effect of positive stimuli is far more powerful and far reaching than that of negative stimuli. His first statement of the law of effect was simply that situations that elicit positive reactions tend to produce continuance of positive reactions, while situations that elicit negative or avoidance reactions tend to produce continuance of these. It was later that he came to realise that positive reactions build-up stronger response patterns than negative ones. In other words, positive responses are more intentional than negative ones. Which is another way of saying that if you want a positive reaction (or a peak experience), your best chance of obtaining it is by putting yourself into an active, purposive frame of mind. The opposite of the peak experience—sudden depression, fatigue, even the ‘panic fear’ that swept William James to the edge of insanity—is the outcome of passivity. This cannot be overemphasised. Depression—or neurosis—need not have a positive cause (childhood traumas, etc.). It is the natural outcome of negative passivity. The peak experience is the outcome of an intentional attitude. ‘Feedback’ from my activities depends upon the degree of deliberately calculated purpose I put into them, not upon some occult law connected with the activity itself. . . . A healthy, perfectly adjusted human being would slide smoothly into gear, perform whatever has to be done with perfect economy of energy, then recover lost energy in a state of serene relaxation. Most human beings are not healthy or well adjusted. Their activity is full of strain and nervous tension, and their relaxation hovers on the edge of anxiety. They fail to put enough effort—enough seriousness—into their activity, and they fail to withdraw enough effort from their relaxation. Moods of serenity descend upon them—if at all—by chance; perhaps after some crisis, or in peaceful surroundings with pleasant associations. Their main trouble is that they have no idea of what can be achieved by a certain kind of mental effort. And this is perhaps the place to point out that although mystical contemplation is as old as religion, it is only in the past two centuries that it has played a major role in European culture. It was the group of writers we call the romantics who discovered that a man contemplating a waterfall or a mountain peak can suddenly feel ‘godlike’, as if the soul had expanded. The world is seen from a ‘bird’s eye view’ instead of a worm’s eye view: there is a sense of power, detachment, serenity. The romantics—Blake, Wordsworth, Byron, Goethe, Schiller—were the first to raise the question of whether there are ‘higher ceilings of human nature’. But, lacking the concepts for analysing the problem, they left it unsolved. And the romantics in general accepted that the ‘godlike moments’ cannot be sustained, and certainly cannot be re-created at will. This produced the climate of despair that has continued down to our own time. (The major writers of the 20th century—Proust, Eliot, Joyce, Musil—are direct descendants of the romantics, as Edmund Wilson pointed out in Axel’s Castle.) Thus it can be seen that Maslow’s importance extends far beyond the field of psychology. William James had asserted that ‘mystical’ experiences are not mystical at all, but are a perfectly normal potential of human consciousness; but there is no mention of such experiences in Principles of Psychology (or only in passing).

They were real, there was real pain in the world, right this very moment people were suffering unimaginable atrocities and you couldn't close your heart completely, but you couldn't leave it wide open either, because otherwise how could you possibly live your life, when through pure, random luck you got to live in paradise? You had to register the existence of evil, do the little that you could, and then close your mind and think about new shoes.

I asked myself, What is true about a person? Would I change in the same way the river changes color but still be the same person? And then I saw the curtains blowing wildly, and outside the rain was falling harder, causing everyone to scurry and shout. I smiled. And then I realized it was the first time I could see the power of the wind. I couldn't see the wind itself, but I could see it carried the water that filled the rivers and shaped the countryside. It caused me to yelp and dance. I wiped my eyes and looked in the mirror. I was surprised at what I saw. I had on a beautiful red dress, but what I saw was even more valuable. I was strong. I was pure. I had genuine thoughts inside that no one could see, that no one could ever take away from me. I was like the wind. I threw my head back and smiled proudly to myself. And then I draped the large embroidered red scarf over my face and covered those thoughts up. But underneath the scarf I still knew who I was. I made a promise to myself. I would always remember my parent's wishes, but I would never forget myself

You and I the moneyed, the privileged, the fortunate, shall not fare so badly in this world, provided our luck holds. What of it if our consciences itch? Why undermine the dominance of our race, our gunships, our heritage and our legacy? Why fight the "natural" order of things? Why? Because of this: -- one fine day, a purely predatory world shall consume itself. Yes, the Devil shall take the hindmost until the foremost is the hindmost. In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction.

Dr. Tom Lawson, so Chief Engineer Lawrence had decided, was an exception to the old saying, “To know all is to forgive all.” The knowledge that the astronomer has passed a loveless, institutionalised childhood and had escaped from his origins by prodigies of pure intellect, at the cost of all other human qualities helped one to understand him—but not to like him. It was singular bad luck, thought Lawrence, that he was the only scientist within three hundred thousand kilometres who happened to have an infra-red detector, and knew how to use it.

You & I, the moneyed, the privileged, the fortunate, shall not fare so badly in this world, provided our luck holds. What of it if our consciences itch? Why undermine the dominance of our race, our gunships, our heritage & our legacy? Why fight the “natural” (oh, weaselly word!) order of things? Why? Because of this:—one fine day, a purely predatory world shall consume itself. Yes, the Devil shall take the hindmost until the foremost is the hindmost. In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction.

I come from a loving family. We may not have always liked each other but we always loved each other. We hug and kiss and wrestle and fight. We don't hold a grudge. I come from a long line of rule breakers, outlaw libertarians who vote red down the line because they believe it'll keep pure outlaws from trespassing on their territory. I come from a family of disciplinarians where you better follow the rules until you're man enough to break them, where you did what mom and dad said ‘because I said so,’ and if you didn't, you didn't get grounded, you got the belt or a backhand because it gets your attention quicker and doesn't take away your most precious resource: time. I come from a family who took you across town to your favorite cheeseburger and milkshake joint to celebrate your lesson learned immediately following your corporal correction.I come from a family that might penalize you for breaking the rules but definitely punish you for getting caught. We know that what tickles us often bruises others because we deal or deny it. We're the last to cry uncle to bad luck. It's a philosophy that has made me a hustler in both senses of the word. I work hard and I like to grift. It's a philosophy that's also led to some great stories.

Learn to win a lady's faith Nobly, as the thing is high; Bravely, as for life and death— With a loyal gravity. Lead her from the festive boards, Point her to the starry skies, Guard her, by your truthful words, Pure from courtship's flatteries.' MRS. BROWNING. “my own case it is no good luck, nor merit, nor talent,—but simply the habits of life which taught me to despise indulgences not thoroughly earned...” 'There's iron, they say, in all our blood, And a grain or two perhaps is good; But his, he makes me harshly feel, Has got a little too much of steel.' ANON. ‘I ask Thee for a thoughtful love, Through constant watching wise, To meet the glad with joyful smiles, And to wipe the weeping eyes; And a heart at leisure from itself To soothe and sympathise.' ANON.

I go to one of my favorite Instagram profiles, the.korean.vegan, and I watch her last video, in which she makes peach-topped tteok. The Korean vegan, Joanne, cooks while talking about various things in her life. As she splits open a peach, she explains why she gave up meat. As she adds lemon juice, brown sugar, nutmeg, a pinch of salt, cinnamon, almond extract, maple syrup, then vegan butter and vegan milk and sifted almond and rice flour, she talks about how she worried about whitewashing her diet, about denying herself a fundamental part of her culture, and then about how others don't see her as authentically Korean since she is a vegan. I watch other videos by Joanne, soothed by her voice into feeling human myself, and into craving the experiences of love she talks of and the food she cooks as she does. I go to another profile, and watch a person's hands delicately handle little knots of shirataki noodles and wash them in cold water, before placing them in a clear oden soup that is already filled with stock-boiled eggs, daikon, and pure white triangles of hanpen. Next, they place a cube of rice cake in a little deep-fried tofu pouch, and seal the pouch with a toothpick so it looks like a tiny drawstring bag; they place the bag in with the other ingredients. "Every winter my mum made this dish for me," a voice says over the video, "just like how every winter my grandma made it for my mum when she was a child." The person in the video is half Japanese like me, and her name is Mei; she appears on the screen, rosy cheeked, chopsticks in her hand, and sits down with her dish and eats it, facing the camera. Food means so much in Japan. Soya beans thrown out of temples in February to tempt out demons before the coming of spring bring the eater prosperity and luck; sushi rolls eaten facing a specific direction decided each year bring luck and fortune to the eater; soba noodles consumed at New Year help time progress, connecting one year to the next; when the noodles snap, the eater can move on from bad events from the last year. In China too, long noodles consumed at New Year grant the eater a long life. In Korea, when rice-cake soup is eaten at New Year, every Korean ages a year, together, in unison. All these things feel crucial to East Asian identity, no matter which country you are from.

I’ve been sitting here and thinking about God. I don’t think I believe in God any more. It is not only me, I think of all the millions who must have lived like this in the war. The Anne Franks. And back through history. What I feel I know now is that God doesn’t intervene. He lets us suffer. If you pray for liberty then you may get relief just because you pray, or because things happen anyhow which bring you liberty. But God can’t hear. There’s nothing human like hearing or seeing or pitying or helping about him. I mean perhaps God has created the world and the fundamental laws of matter and evolution. But he can’t care about the individuals. He’s planned it so some individuals are happy, some sad, some lucky, some not. Who is sad, who is not, he doesn’t know, and he doesn’t care. So he doesn’t exist, really. These last few days I’ve felt Godless. I’ve felt cleaner, less muddled, less blind. I still believe in a God. But he’s so remote, so cold, so mathematical. I see that we have to live as if there is no God. Prayer and worship and singing hymns—all silly and useless. I’m trying to explain why I’m breaking with my principles (about never committing violence). It is still my principle, but I see you have to break principles sometimes to survive. It’s no good trusting vaguely in your luck, in Providence or God’s being kind to you. You have to act and fight for yourself. The sky is absolutely empty. Beautifully pure and empty. As if the architects and builders would live in all the houses they built! Or could live in them all. It’s obvious, it stares you in the face. There must be a God and he can’t know anything about us.

I tried. I loved them—the very bones of them—with every single bit of me, and I wanted more than anything to keep them safe. And I tried. But—and this is the thing I just came to understand—every time they were safe, for all those days and years before the checkout line, every time they went to school or rode in a car or rode their bikes down the street or kicked a ball or ate a meal or caught a cold or danced in the living room with me or waited in a checkout line with me, danger was right there, brushing past them, parting to let them by, or swerving away just in time. It was right there. But before the checkout line day, they were safe, and I helped, you helped, we did our best, but mostly it was pure grace. Luck. We do what we can, but luck tips the scales in the end. Every time they were ever safe, they could just as easily have not been. Do you see what I mean?

This other Lucy is nothing like the demure, sweet victim of the hagiographies or the pure, white vision I’ve just seen outside the cathedral. Instead, on 13 December, she is said to ride through the skies with a cavalcade of the dead, of ghosts and, sometimes, of children who died while still unbaptised. Going house to house with her terrifying entourage, she looks for the food that has been left out for her. If all is well, she’ll eat the offerings and bring good fortune in return, and if she encounters any good children on her way she gives them treats. But if the food offerings are incorrect or forgotten, and if Lucy finds that the tasks of the household – especially those related to weaving – have not been finished and laid aside for her celebration, she brings disorder, bad luck and death. If she finds children who have misbehaved, she’ll gut them, pull out their organs, stuff them full of straw, and sew them back up again. Sometimes she’s depicted holding a distaff with a child’s intestines twined around it, an impressive combining of the normally very separate interests of cloth-making and disembowelling.

Luck plays such an overpowering role in some lives that the thoughtful person must ask: ‘Why have I been cursed with bad luck while another is blessed with so much good luck?’ Believe me, the fortunate person who receives the favorable breaks also wonders about his favored situation. In my case, I have no explanation. I was hardworking; I had a tough character; I was a good student; and I acknowledged the leadership of my superiors. But no amount of hard work or high standard of behavior could have brought the many good things that happened to me; pure chance dictated most of them. The only generalization I can offer is that in an irrational world if a prudent course has been followed, you make yourself eligible to capitalize on luck if it happens to strike. If you have not made yourself eligible, you may never be aware that luck is at hand. By all this I mean: learn typing, master math, learn to draft a convincing letter, broaden the mind, and do not evade challenges. Making oneself eligible to seize the breaks if and when they come is the only sensible strategy I know. Be prepared to make full use of any stroke of luck, and even if it never comes, the preparation in itself will be a worthy effort.” —Chapter VIII, “Writing”, page 289

When General Genius built the first mentar [Artificial Intelligence] mind in the last half of the twenty-first century, it based its design on the only proven conscious material then known, namely, our brains. Specifically, the complex structure of our synaptic network. Scientists substituted an electrochemical substrate for our slower, messier biological one. Our brains are an evolutionary hodgepodge of newer structures built on top of more ancient ones, a jury-rigged system that has gotten us this far, despite its inefficiency, but was crying out for a top-to-bottom overhaul. Or so the General genius engineers presumed. One of their chief goals was to make minds as portable as possible, to be easily transferred, stored, and active in multiple media: electronic, chemical, photonic, you name it. Thus there didn't seem to be a need for a mentar body, only for interchangeable containers. They designed the mentar mind to be as fungible as a bank transfer. And so they eliminated our most ancient brain structures for regulating metabolic functions, and they adapted our sensory/motor networks to the control of peripherals. As it turns out, intelligence is not limited to neural networks, Merrill. Indeed, half of human intelligence resides in our bodies outside our skulls. This was intelligence the mentars never inherited from us. ... The genius of the irrational... ... We gave them only rational functions -- the ability to think and feel, but no irrational functions... Have you ever been in a tight situation where you relied on your 'gut instinct'? This is the body's intelligence, not the mind's. Every living cell possesses it. The mentar substrate has no indomitable will to survive, but ours does. Likewise, mentars have no 'fire in the belly,' but we do. They don't experience pure avarice or greed or pride. They're not very curious, or playful, or proud. They lack a sense of wonder and spirit of adventure. They have little initiative. Granted, their cognition is miraculous, but their personalities are rather pedantic. But probably their chief shortcoming is the lack of intuition. Of all the irrational faculties, intuition in the most powerful. Some say intuition transcends space-time. Have you ever heard of a mentar having a lucky hunch? They can bring incredible amounts of cognitive and computational power to bear on a seemingly intractable problem, only to see a dumb human with a lucky hunch walk away with the prize every time. Then there's luck itself. Some people have it, most don't, and no mentar does. So this makes them want our bodies... Our bodies, ape bodies, dog bodies, jellyfish bodies. They've tried them all. Every cell knows some neat tricks or survival, but the problem with cellular knowledge is that it's not at all fungible; nor are our memories. We're pretty much trapped in our containers.

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In my youth . . . my sacred youth . . . in eaves sole sparowe sat not more alone than I . . . in my youth, my saucer-deep youth, when I possessed a mirror and both a morning and an evening comb . . . in my youth, my pimpled, shame-faced, sugared youth, when I dreamed myself a fornicator and a poet; when life seemed to be ahead somewhere like a land o’ lakes vacation cottage, and I was pure tumescence, all seed, afloat like fuzz among the butterflies and bees; when I was the bursting pod of a fall weed; when I was the hum of sperm in the autumn air, the blue of it like watered silk, vellum to which I came in a soft cloud; O minstrel galleons of Carib fire, I sang then, knowing naught, clinging to the tall slim wheatweed which lay in a purple haze along the highway like a cotton star . . . in my fumbling, lubricious, my uticated youth, when a full bosom and a fine round line of Keats, Hart Crane, or Yeats produced in me the same effect—a moan throughout my molecules—in my limeade time, my uncorked innocence, my jellybelly days, when I repeated Olio de Oliva like a tenor; then I would touch the page in wonder as though it were a woman, as though I were blind in my bed, in the black backseat, behind the dark barn, the dim weekend tent, last dance, date's door, reaching the knee by the second feature, possibly the thigh, my finger an urgent emissary from my penis, alas as far away as Peking or Bangkok, so I took my heart in my hand, O my love, O my love, I sighed, O Christina, Italian rose; my inflated flesh yearning to press against that flesh becoming Word—a word—words which were wet and warm and responsive as a roaming tongue; and her hair was red, long, in ringlets, kiss me, love me up, she said in my anxious oral ear; I read: Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour; for I had oodles of needs, if England didn't; I was nothing but skin, pulp, and pit, in my grapevine time, during the hard-on priesthood of the poet; because then—in my unclean, foreskinned, and prurient youth—I devoutly believed in Later Life, in Passion, in Poetry, the way I thought only fools felt about God, prayer, heaven, foreknowledge, sin; for what was a poem if not a divine petition, a holy plea, a prophecy: [...] a stranger among strangers, myself the strangest because I could never bring myself to enter adolescence, but kept it about like a bit of lunch you think you may eat later, and later come upon at the bottom of a bag, dry as dust, at the back of the refrigerator, bearded with mold, or caked like sperm in the sock you've fucked, so that gingerly, then, you throw the mess out, averting your eyes, just as Rainer complained he never had a childhood—what luck!—never to have suffered birthpang, nightfear, cradlecap, lake in your lung; never to have practiced scales or sat numb before the dentist's hum or picked your mother up from the floor she's bled and wept and puked on; never to have been invaded by a tick, sucked by a leech, bitten by a spider, stung by a bee, slimed on by a slug, seared by a hot pan, or by paper or acquaintance cut, by father cuffed; never to have been lost in a crowd or store or parking lot or left by a lover without a word or arrogantly lied to or outrageously betrayed—really what luck!—never to have had a nickel roll with slow deliberation down a grate, a balloon burst, toy break; never to have skinned a knee, bruised a friendship, broken trust; never to have had to conjugate, keep quiet, tidy, bathe; to have lost the chance to be hollered at, bullied, beat up (being nothing, indeed, to have no death), and not to have had an earache, life's lessons to learn, or sums to add reluctantly right up to their bitter miscalculated end—what sublime good fortune, the Greek poet suggested—because Nature is not accustomed to life yet; it is too new, too incidental, this shiver in the stone, never altogether, and would just as soon (as Culp prefers to say) cancer it; erase, strike, stamp it out— [...]

The result is that CEOs are often rewarded for pure luck; when the stock market valuation of the firm goes up, even if it is due to pure chance (e.g., world crude oil prices went up, the exchange rate moved in the firm’s favor), their salary increases. The one exception, which in some ways proves the rule, is that CEOs of companies where there is a single large shareholder who sits on the board (and is vigilant because it is his own money on the line) get paid significantly less for luck than for genuinely productive management.56

Xavier and Catalina sat in the VIP box, waving down at us enthusiastically and I waved back before giving Darius my full attention. The entire right side of his face was covered in mud, not to mention the rest of him and his torn jersey fell open to reveal the firm cut of his abs and that perfect V which dipped beneath his waistband. “You’re killing it out there,” I told him truthfully, flashing a sweet smile which instantly had him narrowing his eyes in suspicion. We hadn’t exactly talked much since the whole three way thing and I was really curious about how he was feeling about that. But I was even more curious as to how he was going to react when he realised I’d been playing with the sack of treasure I stole from him oh so long ago. There were plenty of times when I’d thought about the little stash we’d hidden out in the woods and wondered why he hadn’t asked for it back and there was only one reason that made any sense – he assumed I didn’t have it anymore. I didn’t know if he thought I’d sold it or destroyed it, but I was about to remind him that I still had it and see how nice he was when his temper flared. I was pretty sure there was a guide book or two out there about not poking a Dragon, but I guessed I was just too stupid to care. “Thanks. Are you looking for me to make some cheesy statement like I’m thinking of you every time I tackle someone?” he teased and I laughed, tossing my hair. He frowned at me and I had to admit that might have been overkill, but whatever. “Nice to know I’m on your mind every time you have someone pinned beneath you in the mud,” I purred. From the corner of my eye, I noticed Mildred rising to her feet in the stands with a face like an angry Koala which had been hit by a car. I didn’t have long before she came over here to stake her claim on her Dragon, but I didn’t need much time. “I think I’ve made my desire to pin you beneath me pretty clear,” Darius replied in a low voice which had my toes curling, but I wasn’t here to flirt, I was here to poke a Dragon. “Good luck for the second half,” I said in a sweet voice, reaching out touch his bicep, making sure that the gold rings pressed against his skin. Darius looked down the moment he felt his magic stir in response to the gold and his eyes widened in surprise which was quickly followed by a flash of fury as he recognised the jewellery from his stash which I’d stolen. I whirled away from him with a dark laugh before he could do any more than suck in an angry breath and I jogged out to join my squad just as they started up a chant. V – E – G – A! She’ll wipe the floor with you today! Veeeeega! Veeeeega! I fell into the moves of the chant, clapping my hands as some of the others rustled pom-poms and Darcy offered me an appreciative smile from the side of the pitch. We had little chants like that for all of the team members, but we often forgot to call out for the Heirs. The music suddenly dropped and 7 Rings by Ariana Grande burst from speakers around the stadium as we moved into a full routine filled with dance moves and tricks. The song choice turned out to be perfect for taunting a gold obsessed Dragon as well as performing a badass routine to and I couldn’t help but smirk like a psychopath throughout. Darius stood glaring at me from the side of the pitch even when Seth tried to drag him into the locker rooms and my heart thundered at the pure fury in his eyes. Remind me again why I thought poking the Dragon was a good idea because he looks ready to shit a brick! I turned my eyes from him, grinning out at the crowd as I moved between my girls, running forward as I performed a set of hand springs which ended in me throwing a huge blast of multicoloured petals up into the air so that they fell over the crowd. (Tory)

Andrei glances up. The angle of candlelight flushes his hollow, old man’s face with youth. He smiles at her. Although his eyes are only shadows in this light, she knows their exact colour. They are blue-black, like the waters of Lake Baikal. Andrei says that Lake Baikal is ten kilometres deep. No one knows what is down there, though they say that Baikal sturgeon can live for three hundred years. The waters of the lake are pure and life-giving. Even the stones from its shores bring luck. How much you could hide, in water ten kilometres deep. But Andrei’s eyes don’t conceal anything from her in their depths. However deep she goes, there is still love, so complete and undistorted that it frightens her. She is used to living with tangled people, and their tangled stories. But Andrei isn’t like that. I love you, I want to be with you, come with me. She hasn’t grown up with such words. Maybe that was why she turned him away when he asked his question. Maybe he frightens her, just a little, because he’s at ease in such deep waters. He is going to make her join him there. And he asks her questions no one has ever asked before. ‘So you wouldn’t sit beside me?’

There's no messing with perfection. (Okay, a little messing, just for fun.) A few crystals of coarse sea salt, a drizzle of local olive oil, and a sprig or two of purple basil. Sliced and layered in a white ceramic dish, the tomatoes often match the hues of the local sunsets--- reds and golds, yellows and pinks. If there were such a thing in our house as "too pretty to eat," this would be it. Thankfully, there's not. If I'm not exactly cooking, I have done some impromptu matchmaking: baby tomatoes with smoked mozzarella, red onions, fennel, and balsamic vinegar. A giant yellow tomato with a local sheep's milk cheese and green basil. Last night I got a little fancy and layered slices of beefsteak tomato with pale green artichoke puree and slivers of Parmesan. I constructed the whole thing to look like the Leaning Tower of Pisa. I love to think of the utterly pretentious name this would be given in a trendy Parisian bistro: Millefeuille de tomate provençale, tapenade d'artichaut et coppa de parmesan d'Italie (AOC) sur son lit de salade, sauce aigre douce aux abricots. And of course, since this is a snooty Parisian bistro and half their clientele are Russian businessmen, the English translation would be printed just below: Tomato napoleon of artichoke tapenade and aged Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese on a bed of mixed greens with sweet-and-sour apricot vinaigrette. The sauce abricot was a happy accident. While making the dressing for the green salad, I mistook a bottle of peach/apricot syrup for the olive oil. Since I didn't realize my mistake until it was at the bottom of the bowl, I decided to try my luck. Mixed with Dijon mustard and some olive oil, it was very nice--- much sweeter than a French vinaigrette, more like an American-style honey Dijon. I decided to add it to my pretentious Parisian bistro dish because, believe it or not, Parisian bistros love imitating American food. Anyone who has been in Paris in the past five years will note the rise of le Tchizzberger. (That's bistro for "cheeseburger.") I'm moderate in my use of social media, but I can't stop taking pictures of the tomatoes. Close up, I've taken to snapping endless photos of the voluptuously rounded globes. I rejoice in the mingling of olive oil and purply-red flesh. Basil leaves rest like the strategically placed tassels of high-end strippers. Crystals of sea salt catch the afternoon sun like rhinestones under the glaring lights of the Folies Bergère. I may have invented a whole new type of food photography: tomato porn.

They hadn't the first thing to do with inventing wormholes; it was the same pure imbecilic drooling luck that so many of the bloody things opened up just outside Aluno Prime's gravitational sphere of influence that dealt Europe a royal flush of luxury high-speed horses, butter-dispensing cows, jumper-shedding sheep, bacon-distributing pigs, and nonunionized donkeys, and Australia a full hand of fuck all.

There is more nobility in hard work than in pure luck (though every artist can use a bit of that). You’ll make better art after a day at the office than you will after a lifetime in an ivory tower. Real artists have day jobs, and night jobs, and afternoon jobs. Real artists make things other than art, and then they make time to make art because art is screaming to get out from inside them. Screaming, or begging, or gently whispering. Don’t ever let them tell you you’re not a success. Don’t ever let them tell you you’re not good enough. Don’t ever let them tell you you’re not the real deal. More important: don’t ever tell yourself any of these things. Believe me when I tell you that no matter how much time you spend at the office, it’s just a side gig. You are an artist, full-time, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Now go make your art.

Down and down, around and around and around. Step to step to step. She didn’t stop. Couldn’t stop. As if she had been freed from a cage she hadn’t realized she’d been held in. Every step downward, she heard the words. Never again. She had escaped the kelpie by pure luck. But she had been terrified. As terrified as when she’d been hauled into the depths of the Cauldron, as terrified as she’d been with Tomas. At least with Tomas, she had fought. With the kelpie, she had barely done anything until the Mask had spared her. She had become so afraid. So meek and trembling. It was unacceptable. Unacceptable that she had let herself balk and cower and curl inward.

Being born with beauty or talent or wealth, that’s pure dumb luck,” he said once. “What you do with it, that’s what distinguishes a great man.

I turn and smile at Lev. The first night I met Lev, it ended with him shooting me and our families forming an alliance to take down the Lebedev Bratva. The shot had been a nasty one, and my shoulder still aches from time to time. It doesn’t surprise me at all that when he smacks my shoulder, he makes sure to hit the exact spot where the bullet went through. “You are such a dick,” I tell him, making him laugh. “I can’t believe I saved your life after you shot me.” I think about the night we rescued Alina. It had been chaos, and it was pure luck that I happened to look over at just the right moment to see the man aiming a gun at Lev. I’d yelled his name, and he’d ducked just in time. “Oh, come on now. You would’ve never forgiven yourself if you’d just stood there and let me die.” I raise a brow at him. “I’m guessing I could’ve managed it.

There is no such thing in this world as a pure meritocracy.Nobody gets to the top without being lucky. Luck happens to the most deserving of people and some of the most undeserving.

The upshot: An early run of success makes people feel they suddenly have power over a purely random process. Instead of attributing the results to an abstract force like “chance,” they now believe in “luck,” a personal force that watches over them (at least temporarily) like a guardian angel. So long as luck seems to be lingering in the air, people feel compelled to make the most of it—and that can lead investors to take reckless amounts of risk.

If you’re a student who is desperately attached to a handful of those schools, you need to pull back and think about how quixotic your quest is, recognizing the roles that patronage and pure luck play. You’re going to get into a college that’s more than able to provide a superb education to anyone who insists on one and who takes firm charge of his or her time there. But your chances of getting into the school of your dreams are slim. Your control over the outcome is very, very limited, and that outcome says nothing definitive about your talent or potential. To lose sight of that is to buy into, and essentially endorse, a game that’s spun wildly out of control.

The second my lips landed on his, I was gone. Gone. They tasted so sweet… pure and plump and ripe for the taking. I wanted to keep my mouth on his for the rest of my damned life if this was how good his kiss felt. My hands held each side of his face while I plundered his mouth, my tongue seeking more and more and more. I wanted to learn every last bit of what it felt like to kiss the beautiful man, and I wanted to drag my lips down across the inches of creamy skin to find the warm expanse of silk under his clothes. I’m kissing a man.

Ultimately, there appears to be no clear way out of the loop of is-ought without smuggling in an ought-assumption or claim about how reality should be. In the end, perhaps the solution to the problems of fairness, luck, and morality is somewhat less about finding perfect fairness or objective right and wrong and more about moving forth with an effort of understanding, forgiveness, and compassion for the absurdity of it all. Perhaps the solution is a sort of compassion for everyone and everything—for those who appear to us to be good and for those who appear to us to be bad, throughout history, throughout the globe, and into the future. Again, this does not mean complacency and total tolerance. One can punish, fight, or resist someone or something that they believe is wrong while still having compassion for the other’s situation. In truth, none of us chose to be born into this world as who and what we are; none of us set up the rules; none of us ever really had a say. But we are all here now. And over the course of human history, compassion appears to be one of the through lines, if not the only through line, that has saved us—one that forges positive change and allows us to forgive ourselves not just for the mistakes we’ve made but for those that we will undoubtedly continue to make in the future. In the words of the German pessimist philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer: Boundless compassion for all living beings is the surest and most certain guarantee of pure moral conduct, and needs no casuistry. Whoever is filled with it will assuredly injure no one, do harm to no one, encroach on no man’s rights; he will rather have regard for every one, forgive every one, help every one as far as he can, and all his actions will bear the stamp of justice and loving-kindness.

Tom had latched onto a floating barrel after having fallen off (Of course I fell, don’t be daft, boy. Who would’a pushed me?) and was carried back towards the peninsula where he was picked up by a fishing boat by pure luck. (You should stop calling me ‘lad’ and ‘boy’, Tom. As it turns out I’m over a year older than you, said Jon. Tom laughed. All right, old man, he replied with a kiss. Now, hush… I’m telling my story.)

Gambling wasn't even about the money, was it? Not the action, not the bells, not the adrenaline, those were just add-ons. It was about the luck . . . the jouissance of gambling, it was pure, goddamned luck. The high holiest of holies.

The Connecticut River March 2, 1704 Temperature 10 degrees The Indians, it seemed, had paused here on their journey south from Canada to go hunting before the battle. Under the snow were stored the carcasses of twenty moose. Twenty! Eben had to count them himself before he could believe it, and even then, he could not believe it. Eben was no hunter. If he’d gotten one moose, it would have been pure luck.

The Connecticut River March 2, 1704 Temperature 10 degrees The Indians, it seemed, had paused here on their journey south from Canada to go hunting before the battle. Under the snow were stored the carcasses of twenty moose. Twenty! Eben had to count them himself before he could believe it, and even then, he could not believe it. Eben was no hunter. If he’d gotten one moose, it would have been pure luck. But for this war party to have killed twenty, dragged every huge carcass here so there would be feasting on the journey home--Eben was filled with respect as much as hunger. The Indians made several bonfires and built spits to cook entire haunches. They chopped the frozen moose meat, and Thorakwaneken and Tannhahorens sharpened dozens of thin sticks and shoved small cubes of moose meat onto these skewers. The women and children were each handed a stick to cook. The men were kept under watch, but at last their hands were freed and they too were allowed to eat. The prisoners were too hungry to wait for the meat to cook through and wolfed it down half raw. They ripped off strips for the littlest ones, who ate like baby birds: open mouths turned up, bolting one morsel, calling loudly for the next. When the captives had eaten until their stomachs ached, they dried stockings and moccasins and turned themselves in front of the flames, warming each side, while the Indians not on watch gathered around the largest bonfire, squatting to smoke their pipes and talk. The smell of their tobacco was rich and comforting. The wounded were put closest to the warmth, and hurt English found themselves sharing flames with hurt Mohawk and Abenaki and Huron. One of the Sheldon boys had frozen his toes. His Indian came over to look but shook his head. There was nothing to be done. Ebenezer Sheldon could limp to Canada or give up. “Guess I’ll limp,” said Ebenezer, grinning.

Save cash. Don’t spend just because you have it. Be ready for your business to take a downturn at some point. Being an entrepreneur is about as close to pure meritocracy as you can get, yet any seasoned entrepreneur will tell you that LUCK has been a significant contributor to their success or failure. Set your company up to weather a perfect storm of bad luck someday. Perfection

Finishing Well Requires Mountains of Grace. The mountainous problems that surround us are made flat in the end by God’s grace (4: 7). Our salvation is by grace through faith, as is our completion. Only God’s grace gets us through this fallen world pure. Grace never denies or circumvents our efforts and intentional discipline, but neither can we rely on our efforts to get us to the end sin-free. Those who finish well have not had more luck or been more determined than those who stumbled at the end. They have simply been graced by God. When we breathe our last breath, we should use it to shout “Grace!

Angelina wanted to start them off with a soup, one that would contrast nicely with the veal. She decided on her Mint Sweet Potato Bisque, a wonderful pureed soup, slightly thickened with rice, accented with golden raisins, brightened by fresh mint. And dessert called for pie. This was the first time she was having Johnny and Jerry to the table, and in Jerry's case it was almost a sales pitch, so everything had to be great. She jotted "Pears, black cherries, whole allspice, airplane bottle of Old Overholt Rye" down on her shopping list. The pie would bring it across the finish line. Tracking down fresh mint and black cherries proved problematic. After four stops and no luck, she ended up taking the bus all the way to the Reading Terminal Market. Compromising on dried mint and canned cherries was out of the question. It worked out well enough in the end because she found what she was looking for and even managed to duck into the Spice Terminal and score whole allspice for the pie, some Spanish saffron (because it was on sale), cardamom pods (impossible to find anywhere else), and mace blades (because she'd never tried them before).

I know that a lot of our successes came because we had pure intentions and great talent, and we did a lot of things right, but I also believe that attributing our successes solely to our own intelligence, without acknowledging the role of accidental events, diminishes us. We must acknowledge the random events that went our way, because acknowledging our good fortune—and not telling ourselves that everything we did was some stroke of genius—lets us make more realistic assessments and decisions. The existence of luck also reminds us that our activities are less repeatable. Since change is inevitable, the question is: Do you act to stop it and try to protect yourself from it, or do you become the master of change by accepting it and being open to it? My view, of course, is that working with change is what creativity is about.

She got a sense that their time together was valuable, as though she needed to hold on to every minute as if it were their last. He was too good to be true, every moment spent with him magical, so much so that she presumed this couldn’t last forever. None of her good feelings had lasted forever, none of the people who lightened her life managed to stay. Going by her previous luck, from pure fear of not wanting to lose something so special, she was just waiting for the day he would leave. Whoever he was, he was healing her, he was teaching her to smile, teaching her to laugh, and she wondered what she could teach him.

know that a lot of our successes came because we had pure intentions and great talent, and we did a lot of things right, but I also believe that attributing our successes solely to our own intelligence, without acknowledging the role of accidental events, diminishes us. We must acknowledge the random events that went our way, because acknowledging our good fortune—and not telling ourselves that everything we did was some stroke of genius—lets us make more realistic assessments and decisions. The existence of luck also reminds us that our activities are less repeatable. Since change is inevitable, the question is: Do you act to stop it and try to protect yourself from it, or do you become the master of change by accepting it and being open to it? My view, of course, is that working with change is what creativity is about.

And her story reminds me of this: The fact that I still have my person is just pure dumb luck.

So there would be two of them, probably armed, which probably meant guns, since this was Miami. And it might mean Bobby Acosta, too, who would have some kind of weapon, since he was a wealthy fugitive. And I was in a small room with no place to hide, and I was burdened with Samantha, who would probably yell, “Watch out!” at them if I tried to surprise them. On the plus side, my heart was pure and I had a bent tire iron. It wasn’t much, but I have learned that if you examine the situation carefully, you can almost always find a way to improve your odds. I stood up and looked around the room, thinking that someone might have left an assault rifle lying on a shelf; I even made myself touch the jars and look behind them, but no such luck. “Hey,” Samantha said. “If you’re thinking, like, you know—I mean, I don’t want to be rescued or anything.

symbols of purity and peeling off a petal is our little good luck ritual when we go off to start a new life, which we hope will be more pure than the last.