I don't think I ever fully understood before now the old saying that goes: "A mother's heart loves her young one until he grows; her ill one until he heals; and her traveler until he returns." I have experienced all kinds of waiting; I've waited for my young to grow and the sick to heal, but I am still waiting on my little traveler and I do not know how long it will be until I see him again.

— Zeina Kassem

I doubt that Fleming could have obtained a grant for the discovery of penicillin on that basis [a requirement for highly detailed research plans] because he could not have said, 'I propose to have an accident in a culture so that it will be spoiled by a mold falling on it, and I propose to recognize the possibility of extracting an antibiotic from this mold.

— Hans Selye

I dream for an absentee and oft maligned device—the accident-maker, the soul-taker, my camera; its factory guaranteed third eye, without which I am duly demand memory denied. No pictures for my contrived Arius to declare, excepting some stitch of Sexton manages these sentences of despair.

— Kristen Henderson

If I die on my way to the dance, it will be better than to survive having never lifted my feet.

— Agnostic Zetetic

I'll only tell you what matters. And the truth is, everything matters. Nothing is an accident, really.

— Crystal Woods

I'm just the reason they married. Mum says was a surprise. Dad says was an accident. Truth is ... I am their mistake.

— Emma Cameron

In a nice little house in Afro City there lived a man called Doctor Glickstein. He was a kind of scientist, and he was very good at his job, which is why he always worked from home. He looked a little funny because he kept losing his eyebrows. Quantum Physics, is sort of like ordinary Physics, only you tend to spend a lot more time looking for the cat. He worked in the sitting room because he’d blown the garage up once already. Apparently a lot of things happened by accident in Quantum Physics.

— Christina Engela

In the distance, Amanda heard the sirens. Just a little bit longer. She didn't know what was wrong with her, but she was scared of dying before she had the chance to tell Ryker goodbye. In their capable hands, though, surely they could keep her alive long enough for him to return. They had to.

— Rose Wynters

I pulled the sheet off their faces. Their faces were black with coal dust and didn't look like anything was wrong with them except they were dirty. The both of them had smiles on their faces. I thought maybe one of them had told a joke just before they died and, pain and all, they both laughed and ended up with a smile. Probably not true but it made me feel good to think about it like that, and when the Sister came in I asked her if I could clean their faces, and she said, "no, certainly not!" but I said, "ah, c'mon, it's me brother n' father, I want to," and she looked at me and looked at me, and at last she said, "of course, of course, I'll get some soap and water." When the nun came back she helped me. Not doing it, but more like showing me how, and taking to me, saying things like "this is a very handsome man" and "you must have been proud of your brother" when I told her how Charlie Dave would fight for me, and "you're lucky you have another brother"; of course I was, but he was younger and might change, but she talked to me and made it all seem normal, the two of us standing over a dead face and cleaning the grit away. The only other thing I remember a nun ever saying to me was, "Mai read, you get to your seat, this minute!

— Sheldon Currie

I remember the big gaping hole left by my dad’s absence in the months following the accident. He’d been the one who went to my parent-teacher conferences, the one who taught me mnemonics to memorize the Great Lakes and the Earth’s atmospheres. Whenever I did something silly, my dad always made me feel better by telling me a story from the firehouse about someone who had done something even sillier. Sometimes you don’t realize all the things a person does for you until they aren’t there to do them anymore.

— Paula Stokes