“Herodotus says, "Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all: the conscientious historian will correct these defects.”

“In the last few months, she'd had a lot of time to consider the state of mankind, and she'd decided that people actually had very few choices in their lives. Most things happened to you. Most things rolled right over you and then kept on going.”

“Most of the time - 99 percent of the time - you just don't know how and why the threads are looped together, and that's okay. Do a good thing and something bad happens. Do a bad thing and something good happens. Do nothing and everything explodes. And very, very rarely - by some miracle of chance and coincidence, butterflies beating their wings just so and all the threads hanging together for a minute - you get the chance to do the right thing.”

“Things just happen in the right way, at the right time. At least when you let them, when you work with circumstances instead of saying, 'This isn't supposed to be happening this way,' and trying harder to make it happen some other way.”

“We all convince ourselves of things like this- not necessarily about Say Anything, but about any fictionalized portrayals of romance that happen to hit us in the right place, at the right time.”

“I would not be at all surprised to find that it was for gold that Cain committed the first murder. (It happened a very long time ago, and Holy Writ, though no doubt divinely inspired, is a trifle careless about details. God is not a historian).”