Sometimes you dream about the paths of destiny, and speculate, to no purpose

Every tragedy could really start with the words: "Nothing would have happened, had it not been that..." 

(Had he not got caught in the machine by the tip of his clothing?) 

But surely that is a one-sided view of tragedy, to think of it merely as showing that an encounter can decide one's whole life.

 Ludwig Wittgenstein, from Vermischte Bemerkungen, translated as Culture and Value by Peter Winch

Endless Nights, 147

(although the wish and the thing are so close in the realm of the Endless that you cannot get a thin-bladed knife between them)