Top 40 David Wroblewski Quotes (2026 Update)

1. “You swam in a river of chance and coincidence. You clung to the happiest accidents – the rest you let float by.”

— David Wroblewski

2. “You can fight it or you accept it. The only difference is, if you accept it, you can get to do other things. If you fight it, you’re stuck in the same spot forever.”

— David Wroblewski

3. “Anything can happen. But almost always, just normal things happen and people have happy lives.”

— David Wroblewski

4. “You couldn’t change a river into a sea, but you could trace a new channel for it to follow.”

— David Wroblewski

5. “Nothing is going to happen to me, or you, for that matter. Anything can happen, though. Anything can happen. But most always, just normal things happen, and people have happy lives.”

— David Wroblewski

6. “I think it’s just as likely that someone could say that this place, right here, is heaven, hell and earth all at the same time. And we still wouldn’t know what to do differently. Everyone just muddles through, trying not to make too many mistakes.”

— David Wroblewski

7. “You put yourself in front of the thing and waited for whatever was going to happen and that was all. It scared you and it didn’t matter. You stood and faced it. There was no outwitting anything... it was not a morbid thought, just the world as it existed. Sometimes you looked the thing in the eye and it turned away. Sometimes it didn’t.”

— David Wroblewski

8. “And from the look on his face I could see he was one of the lucky ones, one of those people who like doing what they’re good at. That’s rare. When you see that in a person, you can’t miss it.”

— David Wroblewski

9. “In her life, she’d been nourished and sustained by certain things, him being one of them, Trudy another, and Edgar, the third and most important, but it was really the three of them together, intersecting in her, for each of them powered her heart in a different way.”

— David Wroblewski

10. “She needed to recover. His father had died in January; it was only the end of May. They needed to stick to the routine they’d established during the intervening months. in that way, their life would return to its original shape, like a spring stretched in bad times but contracting eventually into happiness. That the world could come permanently unsprung had never occurred to him.”

— David Wroblewski

11. “He had not opened his eyes in the moment. Her touch had released some tiny increment of the poison bound up in him that would, days to come, ripen into sorrow. And by the time he thought all this he could no longer tell if her caress had truly happened or whether he’d manufactured it out of necessity.”

— David Wroblewski

12. “It is as true for the writer as for the reader that any novel worth its ink should be an experience first and foremost – not an essay, not a statement, not an orderly rollout of themes and propositions. All of which is to say: stories, too, are wild things.”

— David Wroblewski

13. “A person could stop a specific thing, but they couldn’t stop change in general. Rivers can’t run backward. Yet, he felt there must be an alternative, neither willfulness nor resignation. He couldn’t put words to it. All he knew was, neither of them had changed their minds and neither of them could find anything more to say.”

— David Wroblewski

14. “Come morning, his memory would be of a night spent watching over them all. And each of them – dog and boy, mother and old man – would feel the same.”

— David Wroblewski

15. “It was one of the many rules in the kennel, rules that didn’t always make sense, or even seem important, until some situation drew the lesson out.”

— David Wroblewski

16. “No one can say if you are that person who, given good paint, good brushes, and a fine canvas, can produce something better than the factory man. That is, and has always been, beyond the realm of science. You do have the attitude of the dreamer about you. For that reason, I haven’t the heart to argue anymore about this – it is a hopeless talk. And for a simple factory man like me, an effort must be abandoned once its hopelessness is exposed. Only the artist perseveres in such circumstances.”

— David Wroblewski

17. “Dia sudah belajar, dalam hidupnya, bahwa waktu tinggal di dalam dirimu. Kaulah waktu, kau bernapaskan waktu.”

— David Wroblewski

18. “You ask, ‘Why am I really fighting this?’ If the answer is ‘Because I’m scared of what things will be like,’ then, most times, you’re fighting for the wrong reason...”

— David Wroblewski

19. “How had people ever concluded that they could own land in the first place? The land had always been there, and it would outlast any human claimant by a thousand centuries.”

— David Wroblewski

20. “Mary directed her abundance, like her gaze, unconsciously, gracing whatever interested her, and depriving whatever didn’t.”

— David Wroblewski

21. “And their people loved explaining to John what they loved about their dogs – and especially what they hated about other people’s dogs.”

— David Wroblewski

22. “John once claimed that the way to convince a person to do something outlandish was to ask them to do something even more outlandish.”

— David Wroblewski

23. “Henry turned to give Edgar a look – a meaningful look – though Edgar couldn’t be sure exactly what its meaning was. It struck him again how there was something likable about the man’s defeatist sincerity. Henry Lamb saw the world as filled with road blocks and difficulties, or so it seemed. He conveyed, somehow, the impression that no bad news would surprise him, that every situation was a double-bind waiting to be discovered.”

— David Wroblewski

24. “Bachelor isn’t right, I know. I’m a widower. But I hate that word. It reminds me that you’re not here, and you’re not ever going to be here, and then if feels like my chest is having an earthquake. So I say bachelor.”

— David Wroblewski

25. “Suppose you could do one impossible thing.”

— David Wroblewski

26. “You’re either wrong for the right reason or right for the wrong reason.”

— David Wroblewski

27. “There is no such thing as misbehavior. Only behavior.”

— David Wroblewski

28. “You are excused from this evening’s exercise. You will instead spend the evening reviewing the introductory statistics textbook my Staff Sergeant will provide you. And do you know why?” “Sir? No, Sir.” “Because in this army, as in this life, your first obligation is to not be an idiot.”

— David Wroblewski

29. “You needed a patience that spanned generations. And you needed a willingness to sit back and watch how things turned out without leaping to interfere.”

— David Wroblewski

30. “Just because a thing can’t be logged, charted, and summarized doesn’t mean it isn’t real.”

— David Wroblewski

31. “You can never watch too many pups climb through the straw for the first time, but there are just so many dogs you can bear watch to die.”

— David Wroblewski

32. “You know what your problem is?”, John said. “You don’t believe in impossible things.” “Impossible meaning what?” “Meaning impossible. Something you have every reason to expect can’t happen based on your life so far. And that’s a shame. A person ought to believe that at least one impossible thing could happen.” “Why?” “Because it’s interesting for one thing. Also it could save your life.”

— David Wroblewski

33. “A job was a job, nothing more – not a family, not worth loyalty, much less love. Yet at the same time, a factory truly was like the world. It contained friendship and grace and catastrophe and victory and striving and romance and laughter and betrayal – if you knew to watch for those things. If you knew how to see those things, which not everyone did. When you were there, you were making whatever it was you were making, but you were also making a world exist.”

— David Wroblewski

34. “Half the time we walk around in love with the idea of a thing instead of the reality of it. But sometimes things don’t turn out that way. You have to pay attention to what’s real, what’s in the world. Not some imaginary alternative, as if it’s a choice we could make.”

— David Wroblewski

35. “I’m tired of all the death this world keeps insisting on.”

— David Wroblewski

36. “It doesn’t matter who’s coming. What matters is who stays when the people who’ve come along decide to leave.”

— David Wroblewski

37. “He spoke not to a person but to an audience of one.”

— David Wroblewski

38. “Categories are the fuel and ammunition of all mistaken thought.”

— David Wroblewski

39. “It’s a metaphor, Elbow.” “Got that.” And if you don’t believe that an impossible thing could happen to you, when would you ever consider the most important impossibility of all?” “Which is?” “Suppose you could do one impossible thing.”

— David Wroblewski

40. “Perhaps it was the writing of these.”

— David Wroblewski

41. “How to Say ‘Fetch!’” by Vicki Hearne and.”

— David Wroblewski

42. “He felt not hungry, not thirsty, not tired, not even remotely bored, simply above all physical concern, in communion with the movement of time and the world’s steady turning, and he wondered if this was how it felt to be immortal, to know that life had a definite vessel, a tangible purpose: caretaker and courier of the rare, the valuable, the beloved.”

— David Wroblewski

43. “Perhaps there were no ideas in the abstract. Only a person’s reaction to experiences, spaces, arrangements.”

— David Wroblewski