Fate Quotes - Page 23

• Losing your way on a journey is unfortunate. But, losing your reason for the journey is a fate more cruel.

  H. G. Wells

  Journey, Way, Losing

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• Pleasant things to hear, though hearing them from him embarrasses me. I soak up the praise but feel obliged to disparage the gift. I believe that most people have some degree of talent for something--forms, colors, words, sounds. Talent lies around in us like kindling waiting for a match, but some people, just as gifted as others, are less lucky. Fate never drops a match on them. The times are wrong, or their health is poor, or their energy low, or their obligations too many. Something.

  Wallace Stegner

  Lying, Believe, Color

  Wallace Stegner (2007). “Crossing to Safety”, p.50, Modern Library

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• She was one of those people who was born for the greatness of a single love, for exaggerated hatred, for apocalyptic vengance, and for the most sublime forms of heroism but she was unable to shape her fate to the dimensions of her amorous vocation, so it was lived out as something flat and gray trapped between her mother's sickroom walls, wretched tenements, and the tortured confessions with which this large, opulent, hot-blooded woman made for maternity, abundance, action, and ardor- was consuming herself.

  Isabel Allende

  Mother, Wall, Greatness

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• I am wholly yours - you are everything to me; we will sustain each other in all the ills of life it may please fate to inflict upon us; you will soothe my troubles; I will comfort you in yours.

  Denis Diderot

  Comfort, May, Trouble

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• Then I saw it, and it just grabbed me. That moment, that breath just before destiny, between innocence and power. He'll pull the sword free. You know it. And in that moment, the world changes. Camelot's born, Arthur's fate is sealed. He'll unite a people, be betrayed by a woman and a friend, and sire the man who'll kill him. In this moment, he's a boy. In the next he'll be a king.

  Nora Roberts

  Kings, Boys, Destiny

  Nora Roberts (2011). “Nora Roberts' Key Trilogy”, p.137, Penguin

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• I, answering in the end, began: 'Alas, how many yearning thoughts, what great desire, have lead them through such sorrow to their fate?

  Dante Alighieri

  Sorrow, Desire, Ends

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• Death, a necessary end, will come when it will come

  William Shakespeare

  Death, Ides Of March, Ends

  'Julius Caesar' (1599) act 2, sc. 2, l. 30

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• ...Rose of all Roses, Rose of all the World! You, too, have come where the dim tides are hurled Upon the wharves of sorrow, and heard ring The bell that calls us on; the sweet far thing. Beauty grown sad with its eternity Made you of us, and of the dim grey sea. Our long ships loose thought-woven sails and wait, For God has bid them share an equal fate; And when at last defeated in His wars, They have gone down under the same white stars, We shall no longer hear the little cry Of our sad hearts, that may not live nor die.

  William Butler Yeats

  Sweet, Stars, War

  William Butler Yeats (2015). “When You Are Old: Early Poems, Plays, and Fairy Tales”, p.123, Penguin

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• Yet it would be your duty to bear it, if you could not avoid it: it is weak and silly to say you cannot bear what it is your fate to be required to bear.

  Charlotte Bronte

  Silly, Would Be, Bears

  Charlotte Bronte (2013). “Jane Eyre”, p.73, Simon and Schuster

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• In spite of all evidence that life is discontinuous, a valley of rifts, and that random chance plays a great part in our fates, we go on believing in the continuity of things, in causation and meaning. But we live on a broken mirror, and fresh cracks appear in its surface every day.

  Salman Rushdie

  Believe, Play, Mirrors

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• If we go on to cast a look at the fate of these World-Historical persons, whose vocation it was to be the agents of the World-Spirit, we shall find it to have been no happy one. They attained no calm enjoyment; their whole life was labour and trouble; their whole nature was nought else but their master—passion. When their object is attained they fall off like empty hulls from the kernel. They die early, like Alexander; they are murdered, like Caesar.

  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

  Fall, Passion, Personality

  "Reading Hegel: The Introductions".

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• There's no hope. There's no reason to keep trying. Because you must. This is not hope. Not reason. This is your fate. This is your life, what you must do.

  Amy Tan

  Trying, Reason, No Hope

  Amy Tan (2006). “The Joy Luck Club”, p.130, Penguin

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• Surely if we knew what bitterness fate held in store, we would shrink back in fear and let the cup of life pass us by untasted.

  Jacqueline Carey

  Fear, Cups, Bitterness

  Jacqueline Carey (2002). “Kushiel's Dart”, p.314, Macmillan

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• The term bisexual has ended up as the ugly stepchild of sexuality, in both name and meaning. Its fate is symptomatic of the bisexual's own lot in life: to be as common as can be, but unacknowledged.

  Jennifer Baumgardner

  Bisexual, Names, Ugly

  Jennifer Baumgardner (2008). “Look Both Ways: Bisexual Politics”, p.63, Macmillan

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• we look up and we hope the stars look down, we pray that there may be stars for us to follow, stars moving across the heavens and leading us to our destiny, but it's only our vanity. We look at the galaxy and fall in love, but the universe cares less about us than we do about it, and the stars stay in their courses however much we may wish upon them to do otherwise. It's true that if you watch the sky-wheel turn for a while you'll see a meteor fall, flame and die. That's not a star worth following; it's just an unlucky rock. Our fates are here on earth. There are no guiding stars.

  Salman Rushdie

  Falling In Love, Stars, Moving

  Salman Rushdie (1995). “The Moor's last sigh”

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• There is a huge body of evidence to support the notion that me and the police were put on this earth to do extremely different things and never to mingle professionally with each other, except at official functions, when we all wear ties and drink heavily and whoop it up like the natural, good-humored wild boys that we know in our hearts that we are..These occasions are rare, but they happen - despite the forked tongue of fate that has put us forever on different paths.

  Hunter S. Thompson

  Heart, Boys, Ties

  Hunter S. Thompson (2011). “Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the F”, p.289, Simon and Schuster

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• Coincidences are the scars of fate.

  Carlos Ruiz Zafon

  Scar, Coincidence

  Carlos Ruiz Zafon (2005). “The Shadow of the Wind”, p.420, Penguin

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• Fate is a quantity very much like TV: an unstoppable narrative, written, produced and directed by somebody else.

  Zadie Smith

  Narrative, Tvs, Unstoppable

  Zadie Smith (2003). “White Teeth”, p.436, Vintage

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• All migrants leave their pasts behind, although some try to pack it into bundles and boxes-but on the journey something seeps out of the treasured mementoes and old photographs, until even their owners fail to recognize them, because it is the fate of migrants to be stripped of history, to stand naked amidst the scorn of strangers upon whom they see rich clothing, the brocades of continuity and the eyebrows of belonging.

  Salman Rushdie

  Past, Journey, Eyebrows

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• Over and above the various prejudices I acknowledge, the affinities I feel, the attractions I succumb to, the events which occur to me and to me alone- over and above a sum of movements I am conscious of making, of emotions I alone experience- I strive, in relation to other men, to discover the nature, if not the necessity, of my difference from them. Is it not precisely to the degree I become conscious of this difference that I shall recognize what I alone have been put on this earth to do, what unique message I alone may bear, so that I alone can answer for its fate?

  Andre Breton

  Unique, Men, Differences

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• And over your unconsecrated head you'll hear the howling wolves lament their fate and yours the livelong year.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Years, Lament

  Charles Baudelaire, Richard Howard (1983). “Les Fleurs Du Mal”, p.72, David R. Godine Publisher

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• What will be will be.No one can escape fate's design.

  Christopher Paolini

  Design

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• But adulthood," continued the barely twentysomething, "doesn't give you power over what matters most. It doesn't protect you from pain, loss, fate. That's part of being human.

  Cynthia Leitich Smith

  Pain, Loss, What Matters

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• It is the kindness to take in a stranger when the levees break; the selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose their job which sees us through our darkest hours. It is the firefighter's courage to storm a stairway filled with smoke, but also a parent's willingness to nurture a child, that finally decides our fate.

  Barack Obama

  Jobs, Children, Kindness

  First Presidential Inaugural Address, Delivered 20 January 2009

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• To remain alone did not seem to me a terrible fate, no worse than being falsely joined to another person.

  Curtis Sittenfeld

  Terrible, Persons, Seems

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