Quotes About Fate

In fact, it was that which killed him, to his great surprise.

but there are fates that even the most powerful have to submit to. There is nothing I can do to help you change the way things are.

when a witch offers you her love, you should take it. If you don't, it's your own fault when bad things happen to you. It's like having to make a choice: a blessing or a curse. The one thing can't do is choose neither.

We are all subject to the fates. But we must all act as if we are not, or die of despair.

Anything can happen to anyone, but it usually doesn't. Except when it does.

The tragedy of the man not set up for tragedy—that is every man's tragedy.

he walked away understanding, (...) how easily life can be one thing rather than another and how accidentally a destiny is made... on the other hand, how accidental fate may seem when things can never turn out other than they do.

Of a terrible, the incomprehensible way one's most banal, incidental, even comical choices archive the most disproportionate result.

Too late, but I understand. That we don't perish of understanding everything too late, that is a miracle. But we do perish of that -- of just that.

In school we chanted, along with our teacher, I am the Captain of my fate, I am the Master of my soul, and meanwhile, within my own body, an anarchic insurrection had been launched by one of my privates- which I was helpless to put down!

He was struck by how lives diverge and by how powerless each of us is up against the force of circumstance. And where does God figure in this?

It's about life, where the tiniest misstep can have tragic consequences." "Oh

Stunned by how little he'd gotten over her and she'd gotten over him, he walked away understanding, as outside his reading in classical Greek drama he'd never had to understood before, how easily life can be one thing rather than another and how accidentally a destiny is made...

Son, anything can happen to anyone, my father told me, but it usually doesn't.

The profusion of the stars told him unambiguously that he was doomed to die

Sometimes you're lucky and sometimes you're not. Any biography is chance, and, beginning at conception, chance—the tyranny of contingency—is everything. Chance is what I believed Mr. Cantor meant when he was decrying what he called God.

what his uneducated father had been trying so hard to teach him all along: of the terrible, the incomprehensible way one's most banal, incidental, even comical choices achieve the most disproportionate result.

There had to be forces outside. The prayer went, Lead me not in temptation. If people were not led by others, why was the famous prayer that it was?

The tragedy of the man not set up for tragedy—that is every man's tragedy.

Nothing that befalls anyone is too senseless to have happened.

Never in my life had I so harshly judged any adult—not my parents, not even Alvin or Uncle Monty—nor had I understood till then how the shameless vanity of utter fools can so strongly determine the fate of others. "Did you meet Mr. von Ribbentrop?" Now almost girlishly bashful, she replied, "I danced with Mr. von Ribbentrop." "Where?

Here is someone not set up for life's working out poorly, let alone for the impossible. But who is set up for the impossible that is going to happen? Who is set up for tragedy and the incomprehensibility of suffering? Nobody. The tragedy of the man not set up for tragedy--that is every man's tragedy.

Anyone with brains understands that he is destined to lead a stupid life because there is no other kind.

The accident of a wrong turn had brought me there, and all I did by getting out of the car and entering the cemetery to find her grave was to bow to its impelling force. My mother and the other dead had been brought here by the impelling force of what was, after all, a more unlikely accident–having once lived