Quotes About Fate

He may be dead; or he may be teaching English.

I'm double bred for death by fire.

She looked away. You make it like it was the coin. But you're the one. It could have gone either way. The coin didn't have no say. It was just you. Perhaps. But look at it my way. I got here the same way the coin did.

He looked at the boy. You wont shoot, he said. That's what you think. You aint got but two shells. Maybe just one. And they'll hear the shot. Yes they will. But you wont. How do you figure that? Because the bullet travels faster than sound. It will be in your brain before you can hear it. To hear it you will need a frontal lobe and things with names like colliculus and temporal gyrus and you wont have them anymore. They'll just be soup.

Can't stop what's coming. Ain't no waiting on you. That's vanity.

Chigurh shot him through the forehead and then stood watching. Watching the capillaries break up in his eyes. The light receding. Watching his own image degrade in that squandered world.

The following evening as they rode up onto the western rim they lost one of the mules. It went skittering off down the canyon wall with the contents of the panniers exploding soundlessly in the hot dry air and it fell through sunlight and through shade, turning in that lonely void until it fell from sight into a sink of cold blue space that absolved it forever of memory in the mind of any living thing that was.

Anyway, you never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.

All of history [is] a rehearsal for its own extinction.

But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry (of life) will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge of the world that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate.

Your life is set upon you like a dog.

Do you wish you would die? No. But I might wish I had died. When you're alive you've always got that ahead of you. Or you might wish you'd never been born. Well. Beggars cant be choosers.

They were saddened that [Rawlins] was not coming back but they said that a man leaves much when he leaves his own country. They said that it was no accident of circumstance that a man be born in a certain country and not some other and they said that the weathers and seasons that form a land form also the inner fortunes of men in their generations and are passed on to their children and are not so easily come by otherwise.

They sat contemplating towns to come and the poor fanfare of trumpet and drum and the crude boards upon which their destinies were inscribed for these people were no less bound and indentured and they watched like the prefiguration of their own ends the carbonized skulls of their enemies incandescing before them bright as blood among the coals.

Suttree among others, sad children of the fates whose home is the world, all gathered here a little while to forestall the going there.

That good luck might be no such thing. There were few nights lying in the dark that he did not envy the dead.

Me I was always lucky. My whole life. I wouldnt be here otherwise. Scrapes I been in. But the day I seen her come out of Kerr's Mercantile and cross the street and she passed me and I tipped my hat to her and got just almost a smile back, that was the luckiest.

Chigurh shot him in the face. Everything that Wells had ever known or thought or loved drained slowly down the wall behind him. His mother's face, his First Communion, women he had known. The faces of men as they died on their knees before him. The body of a child dead in a roadside ravine in another country.

He saw very clearly how all his life led only to this moment and all after led nowhere at all.

Three weeks ago I was a law abidin citizen. Workin a nine to five job. Eight to four, anyways. Things happen to you they happen. They dont ask first. They dont require your permission.

Like a patrol condemned to ride out some ancient curse.

Each leaf he passed he'd never pass again. They rode over his face like veils, already some yellow, their veins like slender bones where the sun shone through them. He had resolved himself to ride on for he could not turn back and the world that day was as lovely as any day that ever was and he was riding to his death.

There is no one to tell us what might have been. We weep over the night have been, but there is no might have been. There never was. It is supposed to be true that those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it. I don't believe knowing can save us. What is constant in history i agreed and foolishness and a love of blood and this is a thing that even God- who knows all that can be known- seems powerless to change.

They said that it was no accident of circumstance that a man be born in a certain country and not some other and they said that the weathers and seasons that form a land form also the inner fortunes of men in their generations and are passed on to their children and are not so easily come by otherwise.