When we are young, we think life will be like a supo: one fabric, one weave, one grand design. But in truth, life turns out to be more like the patchwork cloths-bits and pieces, odds and ends-people, places, things we never expected, never wanted, perhaps.

In reality, the likelihood of reaching the pinnacle of capitalist society today is only marginally better than were the chances of being accepted into the French nobility four centuries ago, though at least an aristocratic age was franker, and therefore kinder, about the odds. It did not relentlessly play up the possibilities open to all, and so, in turn, did not cruelly equate an ordinary life with a failed one.

The odds are you aren't going to get caught.

There are no secrets. We know what they like to do, they know what we like to do. We play them three times, and the odds are that we win at least one of those.

I would give you seven to one odds that this is going to be a slash piece, but that's OK. I'm willing to take the heat.

It is by all odds the loftiest of cities. It even managed to reach the highest point in the sky at the lowest moment of the depression.

Like a flash of lightning and in an instant the truth was revealed. I drew with a stick on the sand the diagrams of my motor. A thousand secrets of nature which I might have stumbled upon accidentally I would have given for that one which I had wrestled from her against all odds and at the peril of my existence.

I've always been impressed that we are here, surviving, because of the indomitable courage of quite small people against impossible odds.

I think the odds are good. I would be surprised if he didn't (beat the S&P).

It wasn't like the spare rooms of immigrants - packed to the rafters with all that they have ever possessed, no matter how defective or damaged, mountains of odds and ends - the stand testament to the fact that they have things now, where before they had nothing.