Mrs. Next came back into the room. “You never told me you’d bought a gold-plated toilet.” Landen frowned. “We don’t have a gold-plated toilet.” “Oh, … - Jasper Fforde

"Well," he said thoughtfully, "it is my considered opinion that most coincidences are simply quirks of chance—if you extrapolate the bell curve of probability you will find statistical abnormalities that seem unusual but are, in actual fact, quite likely, given the amount of people on the planet and the amount of different things we do in our lives."

"And nothing can stop it?"
"Nothing I know of," he replied sadly. "The best way to stop this is to not allow it to start—sort of a minimum entry requirement for man-made disasters, really."

My father told me that for the most part coincidences could be safely ignored: they were merely that chance discovery of one pertinent fact from a million or so possible daily interconnections. “Stop a stranger in the street,” he would say, “and delve into each other’s past. Pretty soon an astounding-too-amazing-to-be-chance coincidence will appear.”