Wit & Attitude Quote by Laurie Anderson

Anderson’s “miracle” isn’t church language; it’s maker language. It’s the startled gratitude of someone who’s spent a career wiring together sound, story, technology, and sheer weirdness and knows how easily any of it can collapse into noise. Calling working outcomes a “great miracle” is a sly demotion of our usual confidence: we act like functional relationships, functional systems, functional art are the default. For her, the default is failure, friction, glitch. When something coheres, it feels almost supernatural.

The line’s engine is its pivot from “things do work” to “they work for such a wild variety of crazy reasons.” That second clause refuses the comforting myth of clean causality: the idea that effort predictably yields results, that success is a tidy reward for virtue, that a good plan is enough. Anderson suggests the opposite. Life and art succeed through improvisation, accidents, misreadings, coincidences, mood, timing, the wrong tool used the right way. It’s a worldview shaped by performance: you can rehearse, but the room, the audience, the mic feedback, your own nervous system all get votes.

Context matters here because Anderson is a patron saint of hybrid form. Her work treats technology as both instrument and prankster, and narrative as something you sample and loop. In that ecosystem, “crazy reasons” aren’t excuses; they’re the raw material. The intent is quietly liberating: stop pretending you can fully control outcomes. Pay attention to the strange mechanisms that actually make things click, then build with them instead of against them.