Quotes About Fate

Death is not a checkmate…it is more like a carnival trick. You cannot win, no matter how you move your Queen.

Why should he be spared?' 'Someone ought to be.' And it will not be me. I have survived, but I have not been spared.

But the thought arrived inside her like a train: Marya Morevna, all in black, here and now, was a point at which all the women she had been met—the Yaichkan and the Leningrader and the chyerti maiden; the girl who saw the birds, and the girl who never did—the woman she was and the woman she might have been and the woman she would always be, forever intersecting and colliding, a thousand birds falling from a thousand oaks, over and over.

But the trouble is, I do want to be surprised. I want to choose. I broke the heart of my fate so that I could choose. I never chose; I only saw a little girl who looked like me standing on a gear at the end of the world and laughing, and that's not choosing, not really. Wouldn't you rather I chose you? Wouldn't you rather I picked our future out of all the others anyone could have?

She said you'd come and I swore to eat your heart.

Koschei brought you to me. You were so near death that ghosts crowded around you, weeping silver tears, waiting for you with such smiles. You humans, you know, whoever built you sewed irony into your sinews.

Don't worry, my little lump of rock. Everybody gets a chance to choose. Or else where would irony come from?

That's how you get deathless, volchitsa. Walk the same tale over and over, until you wear a groove in the world, until even if you vanished, the tale would keep turning, keep playing, like a phonograph, and you'd have to get up again, even with a bullet through your eye, to play your part and say your lines.

You know what a fate looks like, don't you? It's just a little toy version of yourself, made out of alabaster and emerald and a little bit of lapis lazuli and ambition and coincidence and regret and everyone else's expectations and laziness and hope and where you're born and who to and everything you're afraid of plus everything that's afraid of you.

Bad things happen to bad people. Bad things happen to good people. Bad things happen to okay people. Bad things happen to everyone.

For the world has chosen and it says: make me whole. Think of us as a kind of haggard Calypso, offering everything, asking the world to choose anew. But it's a lie, really. There is only one choice and it is always the same. Only in Pentexore was any other ever possible. The world always says: I choose to wither and die if it means love and tapestries and sons and suitors, if it means stories and wars and a thousand ships launching. And we only give the world what it wants.

It is good that you ruined your face, because it brought you to me, but also because beautiful women rarely work strong magic.

You haven't met your Way yet. It hasn't so much as kissed your hand! You haven't even at the door of the hall where your Way dances. But look here, look see, I've got them, I've caught them up just for you, a big bouquet of anywhere you want to go. Just pick a bloom, my girl, hold it to your pretty nose.

Bad luck relies absolutely on perfect timing

But luck can be spent, like money; and lost, like a memory; and wasted, like a life. If

Once there was a girl who ate an apple not meant for her...Up until the apples, she had been living in a wonderful house in the wilderness, happy in her fate and her ways. She had seven aunts and seven uncles and a postdoctorate in anthropology.

And the heart of Ivan Nikolayevich broke inside the body of Marya Morevna, and the pieces of him lodged deep in her bones, and through the window, the stars watched.

Life is like that. Death sweeps it away. That's what death is for. That's why they keep telling this story. It's the only story.

I thought that for a long while, but you chose me, and then you chose him, and choosing is hard - one choice is never the end of the story.

Death stands behind every bride, every groom.

The Rare Earth Hypothesis means well, but it's colossally, spectacularly, gloriously wrong. Life isn't difficult, it isn't picky, it isn't unique, and fate doesn't enter into the thing. Kick-starting the gas-guzzling subcompact go-cart of organic sentience is as easy as shoving it down a hill and watching the whole thing spontaneously explode. Life wants to happen.

One misfortune may be chance; two might be divine punishment. Three is a plan.

Whatever you do, good or bad, sorry or not, you get punished, darling. Life kicks you in the balls.

Life is full of 'ifs,' Robert. What is important is what we do with what is.