Quotes About Fate

This kind of certainty comes but once in a lifetime.

Death comes to us all; we can only choose how to face it when it comes.

Time to toss the dice

Why Lenin triumphed, why Nicholas failed, why Alexandra placed the fate of her son, her husband and his empire in the hands of a wandering holy man, why Alexis suffered from hemophilia—these are the true riddles of this historical tale. All of them have answers except, perhaps, the last.

It is one of the supreme ironies of history that the blessed birth of an only son should have proved the mortal blow. Even as the saluting cannons boomed and the flags waved, Fate had prepared a terrible story. Along with the lost battles and sunken ships, the bombs, the revolutionaries and their plots, the strikes and revolts, Imperial Russia was toppled by a tiny defect in the body of a little boy.

This marriage had resulted from impulse: he had seen her on a high-flying swing at Tsarkoe Selo and her skirt, flared by the breeze, had exposed her ankles; he had proposed the following day.

I have a secret conviction," he once told one of his ministers, "that I am destined for a terrible trial, that I shall not receive my reward on this earth

Götterdämmerung;

Death is an inconvenience, to be sure," The Wizard Landau Bain, Lucky Stiff (still writing it)

The second round of toast popped up behind David. He said, "I don't know what destiny feels like, but if this is it, I don't like it. I want to un-destiny this place from my life.

Some places speak distinctly. Certain dark gardens cry aloud for a murder; certain old houses demand to be haunted; certain coasts are set apart for shipwreck.

Them that die'll be the lucky ones.

Truly, when the gods set their faces against you, you are fucked.

This is the Black Widow, death.

It is also a near-perfect summary of what happens in the void of war and how history is more often than not a messy combination of intention, courage, preparation, and chance. If

One hardly need believe that the events in your life are actually planned as bolts from the blue, sent special delivery from a deity who is testing and training you like a lab rat! And that is what we are saying when we fretfully ask, "What can God be trying to teach me through this tragedy?

If you can do so, the way lies open to a new Paradise," he predicted. "If you cannot, there lies before you the risk of universal death.

Rebecca West would not be a passing fancy; she would assume a leading role in his life—he could feel it in his bones—and was he ready for that?

he had no doubt that the earth would be a vastly different place—a place where the sword of Damocles hung above it by only the most slender thread, forever after.

The storm to end all storms is coming," he had said, "and the only question is going to be who wields the lightning and the thunder." Oppenheimer had always been prone to such melodramatic language. "It has to be us.

Deus ex machina not only erases all meaning and emotion, it's an insult to the audience. Each of us knows we must choose and act, for better or worse, to determine the meaning of our lives...Deus ex machina is an insult because it is a lie.

It is not heroes that make history, but history that makes heroes." ? Joseph Stalin

We must believe in free will. We have no choice. – Isaac Bashevis Singer

More people perish than want to. Death comes running with astonishing speed, strikes his victims with marvelous accuracy. These include generals, doctors, governesses, soldiers, policemen, ministers. None of them pass away peacefully, as it says in the newspapers. Their executions are violent enough.