“It is not by idle chance that I have come here.”

“I learned...that inspiration does not come like a bolt, nor is it kinetic, energetic striving, but it comes into us slowly and quietly and all the time, though we must regularly and every day give it a little chance to start flowing, prime it with a little solitude and idleness.”

“Life is a chance, a story is a chance. That I am here is a chance.”

“Jelly-bean" is the name throughout the undissolved Confederacy for one who spends his life conjugating the verb to idle in the first person singular- - I am idling, I have idled, I will idle”

“... a comment with the idle arrogance common of such nobodies who have just come into a small bit of power.”

“i think of all the thousands of billions of steps and missteps and chances and coincidences that have brought me here. Brought you here, and it feels like the biggest miracle in the world.”