"We make choices but are constantly foiled by happenstance"
About this Quote
Agency is the story we tell ourselves to keep panic at bay; happenstance is the editor with final cut. Penelope Lively’s line lands because it refuses the comforting extremes: neither the macho fantasy that we can “manifest” our lives, nor the fatalist shrug that everything is predetermined. It’s a novelist’s realism, sharpened into a sentence.
The verb “foiled” is the key. It implies not just interruption but a kind of elegant sabotage: the plan is coherent, the choice sincere, and still the world slips a blade between intention and outcome. “Happenstance” sounds almost polite, even whimsical, which makes the disruption more unsettling. We’re not toppled by epic tragedy alone but by small, indifferent accidents: a missed train, a misheard phrase, an illness that arrives like unwanted mail. Lively’s subtext is that contingency isn’t a plot twist; it’s the plot.
Contextually, this fits a writer whose work often circles memory, history, and the way ordinary lives are rerouted by forces too large or too random to narrate cleanly. Postwar Britain, class mobility, the long shadow of political and social change: these are arenas where individual choice matters, but never in isolation. Lively frames life as a negotiation between will and weather.
The sentence also carries a quiet moral warning. If outcomes are partly accidental, then judgment should be tempered. Success isn’t pure merit; failure isn’t pure fault. What looks like character might be circumstance with better PR.
The verb “foiled” is the key. It implies not just interruption but a kind of elegant sabotage: the plan is coherent, the choice sincere, and still the world slips a blade between intention and outcome. “Happenstance” sounds almost polite, even whimsical, which makes the disruption more unsettling. We’re not toppled by epic tragedy alone but by small, indifferent accidents: a missed train, a misheard phrase, an illness that arrives like unwanted mail. Lively’s subtext is that contingency isn’t a plot twist; it’s the plot.
Contextually, this fits a writer whose work often circles memory, history, and the way ordinary lives are rerouted by forces too large or too random to narrate cleanly. Postwar Britain, class mobility, the long shadow of political and social change: these are arenas where individual choice matters, but never in isolation. Lively frames life as a negotiation between will and weather.
The sentence also carries a quiet moral warning. If outcomes are partly accidental, then judgment should be tempered. Success isn’t pure merit; failure isn’t pure fault. What looks like character might be circumstance with better PR.
Quote Details
| Topic | Free Will & Fate |
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