Quotes About Fate

As we drove away, I asked Dariush whether it was not a relief that under Khatami, such run-ins happened a couple times a year, instead of every weekend. He gave me a searching look. "However infrequent, I do not find any consolation in the fact that my fate is determined by the whim of an armed sixteen-year-old.

When I left class that day, I did not tell them what I myself was just beginning to discover: how similar our own fate was becoming to Gatsby's. He wanted to fulfill his dream by repeating the past, and in the end he discovered that the past was dead, the present a sham, and there was no future. Was this not similar to our revolution, which had come in the name of our collective past and had wrecked our lives in the name of dream?

the condemned man's only privilege is to know the time of his death

But you don't choose the time. The time chooses you. Either you seize what may turn out to be the only chance you have, or you decide you're willing to live with the knowledge that the chance has passed you by.

The truth is, I've never been a big believer in destiny. I worry that it encourages resignation in the down-and-out and complacency among the powerful.

But you don't choose the time. The time chooses you.

when what felt like a wide distribution of probable outcomes narrows to the inevitable.

Our destiny is not written for us, but by us.

If there is a lesson here it has to do with humility. For all our vaunted intelligence and complexity, we are not the sole authors of our destinies or of anything else. You may exercise diligently, eat a medically fashionable diet, and still die of a sting from an irritated bee. You may be a slim, toned paragon of wellness, and still a macrophage within your body may decide to throw in its lot with an incipient tumor.

very little is known about the fate of former welfare recipients because the 1996 welfare reform legislation blithely failed to include any provision for monitoring their postwelfare economic condition

You never knew which split second might be the zigzag bolt dividing all that went before from the everything that comes next.

But luck is just throwing dice.

Nathan was something that happened to us, as devastating in its way as the burning roof that fell on the family Mwanza; with our fate scarred by hell and brimstone we still had to track our course. And it happened finally by the grace of hell and brimstone that I had to keep moving. I moved, and he stood still.

I walked through the valley of my fate, is all, and learned to love what I could lose.

Zeke embodied the contradiction of his generation: jaded about the fate of the world, idealistic about personal prospects.

Probably Emmy had moved now. I would be in Knoxville soon, she'd be in Lee County, and whoever was sitting at control center of the universe, laughing his ass off.

Anybody will tell you the born of this world are marked from the get-out, win or lose.

You could probably think of a hundred little things that would have made this turn out different. But you'd be wrong. A life like your sister's isn't some little pony you can turn around any way you want. It's a train. Once it gets going it's heavier than heaven and hell put together and it runs on its own track.

I felt as though I had a blind date with destiny, and someone had heard a rumor that destiny looked like Christopher Reeve.

All hope and future lost in a day.

With that one little booklet put back in place, it came as a different story. Because of that burrow through rock and water—lacuna, he called it. This time I read with a different heart, understanding the hero would still be standing at journey's end. Or at least, live or die, he'd known of a chance and aimed to take it.

Some of us know how we came by our fortune, and some of us don't, but we wear it all the same.

Oh, it's a fine and useless enterprise, trying to fix destiny. That trail leads straight back to the time before we ever lived, and into that deep well it's easy to cast curses like stones on our ancestors. But that's nothing more than cursing ourselves and all that made us. Had I not married a preacher named Nathan Price, my particular children would never have seen the light of this world. I walked through the valley of my fate, is all, and learned to love what I could lose

The desire for revenge was not unnatural, but it could curdle and embitter the soul, and it often destroyed the avenger. Was it not perhaps infinitely wiser to abjure the wicked and abandon them to the fates, and trust in God to make retribution in His own good time? He found himself saying, almost inaudibly, 'Vengeance is mine; I will repay, sayeth the Lord.