Wit & Attitude Quote by Timothy Zahn

Zahn’s line has the hard, clean edge of a genre writer who’s watched characters mistake narrative convenience for physics. “Luck” isn’t denied so much as demoted: not a mysterious force, but a story people tell when they can’t (or won’t) account for incentives, preparation, systems, and probability. Calling it an “illusion” is a deliberate provocation, because it yanks away a comforting escape hatch. If luck is real, failure can be shrugged off and success can be sanctified. If luck is a mirage, you’re stuck with causality and responsibility.

The quote’s sting lives in its two targets. The “ignorant” don’t distrust luck; they “trust” it, treating randomness like a reliable ally. That’s not just naïveté, it’s a worldview: letting hope pose as a plan. The “foolish,” meanwhile, “chase” luck, turning life into a slot machine strategy, mistaking motion for agency. Zahn sketches a spectrum of self-deception: passive fatalism on one end, frantic superstition on the other.

Contextually, Zahn writes in a tradition (especially in science fiction) that prizes competence: protagonists survive not through cosmic favor but through training, intelligence, alliances, and the cold arithmetic of consequences. The subtext is almost moral: luck-talk is often a cover for power structures and unseen labor. When someone “gets lucky,” we ignore the scaffolding that made that outcome possible. Zahn’s sentence works because it’s less a metaphysical claim than a cultural critique of how people narrate uncertainty to protect their ego.