Fate Quotes

One minute you've got a lucky star watching over you and the next instant it's done a bunk.

~ Salman Rushdie

I'm sorry I started all this by trying to fly and I'd take it back if I could but I can't, so please think of it from my point of view: if you die I will have a dead brother and it will be me instead of you who suffers.Justin thought of his brother on that warm summer day, standing up on the windowsill holding both their futures, light and changeable as air, in his outstretched arms.Of course, Justin thought, I'm part of his fate just as he's part of mine. I hadn't considered it from his point of view. Or from the point of view of the universe, either. It's just a playing field crammed full of cause and effect, billions of dominoes, each knocking over billions more, setting off trillions of actions every second. A butterfly flaps its wings in Africa and my brother in Luton thinks he can fly.The child nodded. A piano might fall on your head, he said, but it also might not. And in the meantime you never know. Something nice might happen.

~ Meg Rosoff

Those whom heaven helps we call the sons of heaven. They do not learn this by learning. They do not work it by working. They do not reason it by using reason. To let understanding stop at what cannot be understood is a high attainment. Those who cannot do it will be destroyed on the lathe of heaven. —Chuang Tse: XXIII

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

You want to know what I believe? I believe in fate, but I also believe in free will. Meaning, there's a path, but we're free to veer away from it. The only problem is that there's no way to know whose path we're following on any given moment. Our own? Our fate's? Other people are on their on paths, too. What happens when we intersect? What happens when someone else wipes our path clean, and we're left with no road to follow? Is that fate? Is that when free will kicks in? Is the path there, but invisible?Who the hell knows?

~ Brigid Kemmerer

Plainly it isn't an exact science, despite it being a complex interaction of micro-decisions and corresponding thought; perhaps it doesn't always work and we pass by some potential soulmates like the proverbial ships in the night, never quite connecting. Then again, perhaps the system is tenacious and continues to run like a computer program on infinite loop, so that if at first you don't meet, you are drawn back together for another try.

~ Simon Pegg

If there is no fate and our interactions depend on such a complex system of chance encounters, what potentially important connections do we fail to make? What life changing relationships or passionate and lasting love affairs are lost to chance?

~ Simon Pegg

The inevitable is no less a shock just because it is inevitable.

~ Jamaica Kincaid

Words of the hero: I am my fate.

~ Marty Rubin

Life is full of alternatives but no choice.

~ Patrick White

It is a shame for anyoneto be well-known for righteousness.It is a great disgrace to feeldistress at the injustice of the turning of the wheels of fate.

~ Omar Khayyám

What connexion can there be, between the place in Lincolnshire, the house in town, the Mercury in powder, and the whereabout of Jo the outlaw with the broom, who had that distant ray of light upon him when he swept the churchyard-step? What connexion can there have been between many people in the innumerable histories of this world, who, from opposite sides of great gulfs, have, nevertheless, been very curiously brought together!

~ Charles Dickens

It troubles him to consider the powerful currents and fine-tuning that alter fate, the close and distant influences, the accidents of character and circumstance.

~ Ian Mcewan

Life has a way of kicking one along like a football, or so I've found. Fate had never dealt me personally a particularly easy time, but that was OK, that was normal. Most people, it seemed to me, took their turn to be football. Most survived. Some didn't.

~ Dick Francis

If I'd been a cowboy, it might've ended well.Somewhere on the ramble, I'm sure I'd have to sellMy guns along the highway. My coins to the table To make a gambler's double, I'd double debts to pay.Prob'ly shrink and slink away, It mightn't've ended well.What If I'd been a sailor? I think it might've ended well.From August to MayFor a searat of man drifting through eternal blue, aboard the finest Debris.I might've called the shanties. From daybreak to storm's set, lines stay Taught, over rhythm unbroken.But, oh, there's a schism unspoken, a mighty calling of the lee.An absentminded Pirate, unaccustomed to the sea;To the land, a traitor. I think it mightn't've ended well. What might've worked for me? What might've ended well?Soldier, to bloody sally forth through hell?Teacher of glorious stories to tell?Man of gold, or stores to sell?Lover to a gentle belle? Maybe a camel;A seashell.What mightn't've been a life where it mightn't've ended well?

~ Dylan Thomas Mccall

I fantasized how no matter what happened, no one could ever come between us, call it wishful thinking, I called it a fact.

~ Holly Hood

Jason decided there was nothing in the world scarier than a gang of bat-wielding grannies.

~ Rick Riordan

You go into the office and take a book or two from the shelves. You read a few lines, like your life depended on reading 'em right. But you know your life doesn't depend on anything that makes sense, and you wonder where in the hell you got the idea it did; and you begin to get sore.

~ Jim Thompson

Niall: We're tossed by the winds of fate. Once we end where they blow us, we make of ourselves that we will.

~ Nora Roberts

In the ill-judged execution of the well-judged plan of things the call seldom produces the comer, the man to love rarely coincides with the hour for loving

~ Thomas Hardy

Instead of comparing our lot with that of those who are more fortunate than we are, we should compare it with the lot of the great majority of our fellow men. It then appears that we are among the privileged.

~ Helen Keller

We do not choose our fate, we can only choose if we accept it. Fate will take us where it will, whether we will it or not.” (Sister Mira)

~ Brenda Cothern

The stage is a magic circle where only the most real things happen, a neutral territory outside the jurisdiction of Fate where stars may be crossed with impunity. A truer and more real place does not exist in all the universe.

~ P.s. Baber

We start each day with a blank sheet of paper in front of us, and what we write on it is up to us.

~ John Larkin

Many men would take the death-sentence without a whimper, to escape the life-sentence which fate carries in her other hand.

~ T.e. Lawrence

It was possible that I'd thrown one too many Molotov cocktails over God's fence.

~ Maggie Stiefvater

Now when Túrin learnt from Finduilas of what had passed, he was wrathful, and he said to Gwindor: 'In love I hold you for your rescue and sake-keeping. But now you have done ill to me, friend, to betray my right name, and call my doom upon me, from which I would lie hid.'But Gwindor answered: 'The doom lies in yourself, not in your name.

~ J.r.r. Tolkien

Archer had always been inclined to think that chance and circumstance played a small part in shaping people's lots compared with their innate tendency to have things happen to them.

~ Edith Wharton

Glanced up and caught Ammu's gaze. Centuries telescoped into one evanescent moment. History was wrong-footed, caught off guard. Sloughed off like an old snakeskin. Its marks , its scars its wouns from old wars and the walking backwards days all fell away. In its abscence it left an aura, a palpable shimmering that was as plain as water in a river or the sun in the sky. As plain to feel the heat on a hot day, or the tug of a fish on a taut line. So obvious that no-one noticed. In that brief moment, Velutha looked up and saw things that he hadn't seen before. Things that had been out of bounds so far, obscured by histor's blinkers....This knowing slid into him cleanly, like the sharp edge of a knife. Cold and hot at once. It only took a moment. Ammu saw that he saw. She looked away. He did too. History's fiends returned to claim them. To rewrap them in its old scarred pelt and drag them back to where they really lived. Where the Love Laws lay down who should be loved. And how. And how much.

~ Arundhati Roy

There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,Rough-hew them how we will

~ William Shakespeare

Ahab is for ever Ahab, man. This whole act's immutably decreed. 'Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before this ocean rolled. Fool! I am the Fates' lieutenant, I act under orders.

~ Herman Melville

It was strange even after suffering from fate, a person in love would choose the same fate over his life.

~ Faraaz Kazi

A man is deficient in understanding until he perceives that there is a whole cycle of evolution possible within himself: repeating endlessly, offering opportunities for personal development.

~ Idries Shah

Certain things need not be said, and there’s nothing, not a whisper, prayer, not a sacrifice, not a payment of any price, that would change what’s about to happen.

~ Alice Hoffman

Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow worldLike a Colossus, and we petty menWalk under his huge legs and peep aboutTo find ourselves dishonorable graves.Men at some time are masters of their fates.The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our starsBut in ourselves, that we are underlings.

~ William Shakespeare

I can't do nothing. Just put it off. And that don't do no good. I reckon it belong to me. I reckon what I going to get ain't no more than mine.

~ William Faulkner

He is where he is supposed to be. And yet the place he has found is also of his own choosing. That is a piece of luck not to be despised.

~ Cormac Mccarthy

I believe in fate and I believe that things happen for a reason but I don't think that there's a high power, necessarily. I believe in karma very much though.

~ Amy Winehouse

If you’re in your life, chance. Viewed from the outside, like a book you’re reading, it’s fate all the way.

~ David Mitchell

Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? But if the great sun move not of himself; but is an errand-boy in heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible power; how then can this one small heart beat; this one small brain think thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I.

~ Herman Melville

You cannot outwit fate by placing little sidebets on the outcome of life. It's either you wade in and play in order to win or you don't play at all. - Matthew Farrell

~ Judith Mcnaught