“It’s so torturously true that wealthy does rhyme with healthy and yet poor does not mean to pour! If by showing off you look more like a dumb, being smart doesn’t bring any luck if you are about to become a boasting bastard Try to strangle a stolen stone in the middle of a world so wrong or perpetrate a pearly trait in no more than a perishing fate and all your brightness goes down the drain.”

“But what was fortune? She had come to believe it was being exactly the same on the inside as on the outside. What was misfortune but the quality of existing as something, or someone else, inside?”

“We feasted, we laughed, we played games, lost and won, we told the best stories. And each week, we could hope to be lucky. That hope was our only joy. And that’s how we came to call our little parties Joy Luck.”

“This indulgence, though not more than Catherine had hoped for, completed her conviction of being favored beyond every other human creature, in friends and fortune, circumstance and chance. Everything seemed to cooperate for her advantage.”

“Are you what is called a lucky man? Well, you are sad every day. Each day has its great grief or its little care. Yesterday you were trembling for the health of one who is dear to you, today you fear for your own; tomorrow it will be an anxiety about money, the next day the slanders of a calumniator, the day after the misfortune of a friend; then the weather, then something broken or lost, then a pleasure for which you are reproached by your conscience or your vertebral column; another time, the course of public affairs. Not to mention heartaches. And so on. One cloud is dissipated, another gathers. Hardly one day in a hundred of unbroken joy and sunshine. And you are of that small number who are lucky! As for other men, stagnant night is upon them.”

“It must be nice to be so strong and to think it’s because you’re so good, that you live right and eat right, so you deserve your health and happiness. But there is such a thing as luck, and there’s more bad luck than good in this world.”

“Right now in this moment we are either opening or closing the door to a new opportunity.The decision is always ours.”

“Es dauerte einen Moment, bis er ihr antwortete:Nein, ich spreche von… von eurer Freiheit, glaube ich. Von dem Glück, das ihr habt, für euch zu leben und auf alles andere zu pfeifen.”

“For some people, she thought, trials were only temporary; they sailed towards happiness through the roughest weather.”

“We are all a great deal luckier that we realize, we usually get what we want – or near enough.”