β
Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans.
β
β
Allen Saunders
β
Fate is like a strange, unpopular restaurant filled with odd little waiters who bring you things you never asked for and don't always like.
β
β
Lemony Snicket
β
Book collecting is an obsession, an occupation, a disease, an addiction, a fascination, an absurdity, a fate. It is not a hobby. Those who do it must do it.
β
β
Jeanette Winterson
β
What's meant to be will always find a way
β
β
Trisha Yearwood
β
Do not be afraid; our fate
Cannot be taken from us; it is a gift.
β
β
Dante Alighieri (Inferno)
β
I carry your heart with me (I carry it in my heart)I am never without it (anywhere
I go you go,my dear; and whatever is done by only me is your doing,my darling)
I fear no fate (for you are my fate,my sweet)I want no world (for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant and whatever a sun will always sing is you
here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart
I carry your heart (I carry it in my heart)
β
β
E.E. Cummings
β
Let me give you a piece of advice. The handsome young fellow who's trying to rescue you from a hideous fate is never wrong. Not even if he says the sky is purple and made of hedgehogs.
β
β
Cassandra Clare (Clockwork Angel (The Infernal Devices, #1))
β
Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.
β
β
C.G. Jung
β
We dream to give ourselves hope. To stop dreaming - well, thatβs like saying you can never change your fate.
β
β
Amy Tan (The Hundred Secret Senses)
β
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
β
β
William Ernest Henley (Echoes of Life and Death)
β
If you can't change your fate, change your attitude.
β
β
Amy Tan
β
Accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate brings you together,but do so with all your heart.
β
β
Marcus Aurelius (Meditations)
β
If you don't like the hand that fate's dealt you, fight for a new one.
β
β
Masashi Kishimoto
β
Knowing too much of your future is never a good thing.
β
β
Rick Riordan (The Lightning Thief (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, #1))
β
You don't find love, it finds you. It's got a little bit to do with destiny, fate, and what's written in the stars.
β
β
AnaΓ―s Nin
β
The fate of your heart is your choice and no one else gets a vote
β
β
Sarah Dessen (This Lullaby)
β
There's nowhere you can be that isn't where you're meant to be...
β
β
John Lennon
β
Every person has the power to change their fate if they are brave enough to fight for what they desire more than anything.
β
β
Stephanie Garber (Caraval (Caraval, #1))
β
I wonder how many people don't get the one they want, but end up with the one they're supposed to be with.
β
β
Fannie Flagg (Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe)
β
Book collecting is an obsession, an occupation, a disease, an addiction, a fascination, an absurdity, a fate. It is not a hobby. Those who do it must do it. Those who do not do it, think of it as a cousin of stamp collecting, a sister of the trophy cabinet, bastard of a sound bank account and a weak mind.
β
β
Jeanette Winterson
β
All my heart is yours, sir: it belongs to you; and with you it would remain, were fate to exile the rest of me from your presence forever.
β
β
Charlotte BrontΓ« (Jane Eyre)
β
I am fated to journey hand in hand with my strange heroes and to survey the surging immensity of life, to survey it through the laughter that all can see and through the tears unseen and unknown by anyone.
β
β
Nikolai Gogol
β
O light! This is the cry of all the characters of ancient drama brought face to face with their fate. This last resort was ours, too, and I knew it now. In the middle of winter I at last discovered that there was in me an invincible summer.
β
β
Albert Camus (LβΓ©tΓ©)
β
It was written I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice.
β
β
Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness)
β
What's the world's greatest lie?... It's this: that at a certain point in our lives, we lose control of what's happening to us, and our lives become controlled by fate.
β
β
Paulo Coelho
β
Often father and daughter look down on mother (woman) together. They exchange meaningful glances when she misses a point. They agree that she is not bright as they are, cannot reason as they do. This collusion does not save the daughter from the motherβs fate.
β
β
Bonnie Burstow (Radical Feminist Therapy: Working in the Context of Violence)
β
Maybe there isnβt such a thing as fate. Maybe itβs just the opportunities weβre given, and what we do with them. Iβm beginning to think that maybe great, epic romances donβt just happen. We have to make them ourselves.
β
β
Marissa Meyer (Cress (The Lunar Chronicles, #3))
β
Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.
β
β
Ralph Waldo Emerson
β
No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path.
β
β
Gautama Buddha (Sayings of Buddha)
β
Captain?"
"Yeah?"
"Do you think it was destiny that brought us together?"
He squinted and, after a thoughtful moment, shook his head. "No. I'm pretty sure it was Cinder.
β
β
Marissa Meyer (Cress (The Lunar Chronicles, #3))
β
Amor Fati β βLove Your Fateβ, which is in fact your life.
β
β
Friedrich Nietzsche
β
Men at some time are masters of their fates. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.
β
β
William Shakespeare (Julius Caesar)
β
There is an odd synchronicity in the way parallel lives veer to touch one another, change direction, and then come close again and again until they connect and hold for whatever it was that fate intended to happen.
β
β
Ann Rule
β
The world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold. The curves of your lips rewrite history.
β
β
Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)
β
Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
β
β
Alfred Tennyson (Idylls of the King and a Selection of Poems)
β
When two people are meant to be together, they will be together. It's fate.
β
β
Sara Gruen (Water for Elephants)
β
When it comes to life, we spin our own yarn, and where we end up is really, in fact, where we always intended to be.
β
β
Julia Glass (Three Junes)
β
Sometimes life has a cruel sense of humor, giving you the thing you always wanted at the worst time possible.
β
β
Lisa Kleypas (Sugar Daddy (Travises, #1))
β
One life is all we have and we live it as we believe in living it. But to sacrifice what you are and to live without belief, that is a fate more terrible than dying.
β
β
Jeanne d'Arc
β
Fate is never fair. You are caught in a current much stronger than you are; struggle against it and you'll drown not just yourself but those who try to save you. Swim with it. and you'll survive
β
β
Cassandra Clare (City of Ashes (The Mortal Instruments, #2))
β
Life is a storm, my young friend. You will bask in the sunlight one moment, be shattered on the rocks the next. What makes you a man is what you do when that storm comes. You must look into that storm and shout as you did in Rome. Do your worst, for I will do mine! Then the fates will know you as we know you
β
β
Alexandre Dumas (The Count of Monte Cristo)
β
Fate," Blue replied, glowering at her mother, "is a very weighty word to throw around before breakfast.
β
β
Maggie Stiefvater (The Raven Boys (The Raven Cycle, #1))
β
It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.
β
β
Gabriel GarcΓa MΓ‘rquez
β
Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn't something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn't get in, and walk through it, step by step. There's no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. That's the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine.
And you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm. No matter how metaphysical or symbolic it might be, make no mistake about it: it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. People will bleed there, and you will bleed too. Hot, red blood. You'll catch that blood in your hands, your own blood and the blood of others.
And once the storm is over you won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won't be the same person who walked in. That's what this storm's all about.
β
β
Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)
β
Home is people. Not a place. If you go back there after the people are gone, then all you can see is what is not there any more.
β
β
Robin Hobb (Fool's Fate (Tawny Man, #3))
β
I admire addicts. In a world where everybody is waiting for some blind, random disaster or some sudden disease, the addict has the comfort of knowing what will most likely wait for him down the road. He's taken some control over his ultimate fate, and his addiction keeps the cause of his death from being a total surprise.
β
β
Chuck Palahniuk (Choke)
β
Be still, sad heart! and cease repining;
Behind the clouds is the sun still shining;
Thy fate is the common fate of all,
Into each life some rain must fall
β
β
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Ballads and Other Poems)
β
I can listen no longer in silence. I must speak to you by such means as are within my reach. You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own than when you almost broke it, eight years and a half ago. Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you. Unjust I may have been, weak and resentful I have been, but never inconstant. You alone have brought me to Bath. For you alone, I think and plan. Have you not seen this? Can you fail to have understood my wishes? I had not waited even these ten days, could I have read your feelings, as I think you must have penetrated mine. I can hardly write. I am every instant hearing something which overpowers me. You sink your voice, but I can distinguish the tones of that voice when they would be lost on others. Too good, too excellent creature! You do us justice, indeed. You do believe that there is true attachment and constancy among men. Believe it to be most fervent, most undeviating, in F. W.
I must go, uncertain of my fate; but I shall return hither, or follow your party, as soon as possible. A word, a look, will be enough to decide whether I enter your father's house this evening or never.
β
β
Jane Austen (Persuasion)
β
But if something was really important, fate made sure it somehow came back to you and gave you another chance.
β
β
Sarah Dessen (The Truth About Forever)
β
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.
β
β
Charlotte BrontΓ« (Jane Eyre)
β
I have always believed, and I still believe, that whatever good or bad fortune may come our way we can always give it meaning and transform it into something of value.
β
β
Hermann Hesse (Siddhartha)
β
Being a detective isn't all about torture and murder and monsters. Sometimes it gets truly unpleasant...The fate of the world may depend on whether or not you can bring yourself to visit your relatives.
β
β
Derek Landy
β
I hate fate. I donβt believe in her. Unfortunately, I think the bitch believes in me.
β
β
Karen Marie Moning (Shadowfever (Fever, #5))
β
Even chance meetings are the result of karmaβ¦ Things in life are fated by our previous lives. That even in the smallest events thereβs no such thing as coincidence.
β
β
Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)
β
Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone - we find it with another.
β
β
Thomas Merton (Love and Living)
β
I didn't fall in love with you. I walked into love with you, with my eyes wide open, choosing to take every step along the way. I do believe in fate and destiny, but I also believe we are only fated to do the things that we'd choose anyway. And I'd choose you; in a hundred lifetimes, in a hundred worlds, in any version of reality, I'd find you and I'd choose you
β
β
Kiersten White (The Chaos of Stars)
β
But what can be done, the one who loves must share the fate of the one he loves.
β
β
Mikhail Bulgakov (The Master and Margarita)
β
Everyone must dream. We dream to give ourselves hope. To stop dreaming - well, that's like saying you can never change your fate. Isn't that true?
β
β
Amy Tan (The Hundred Secret Senses)
β
Destiny is what you are supposed to do in life. Fate is what kicks you in the ass to make you do it.
β
β
Henry Miller
β
We can't choose our fate, but we can choose others. Be careful in knowing that.
β
β
J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Harry Potter, #5))
β
I don't trust society to protect us, I have no intention of placing my fate in the hands of men whose only qualification is that they managed to con a block of people to vote for them.
β
β
Mario Puzo (The Godfather (The Godfather, #1))
β
Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them. Your fate awaits you. Accept it in body and spirit. To get used to the life you'll most likely be leading soon, get rid of your low-class trappings.
β
β
William Shakespeare (Twelfth Night)
β
There is so much about my fate that I cannot control, but other things do fall under the jurisdiction. I can decide how I spend my time, whom I interact with, whom I share my body and life and money and energy with. I can select what I can read and eat and study. I can choose how I'm going to regard unfortunate circumstances in my life-whether I will see them as curses or opportunities. I can choose my words and the tone of voice in which I speak to others. And most of all, I can choose my thoughts.
β
β
Elizabeth Gilbert
β
Fate gives all of us three teachers, three friends, three enemies, and three great loves in our lives. But these twelve are always disguised, and we can never know which one is which until weβve loved them, left them, or fought them.
β
β
Gregory David Roberts (Shantaram)
β
Akhlys lunged at Percy, and for a split second he thought: Well, hey, Iβm just smoke. She canβt touch me, right?
He imagined the Fates up in Olympus, laughing at his wishful thinking: LOL, NOOB!
β
β
Rick Riordan (The House of Hades (The Heroes of Olympus, #4))
β
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
β
β
William Ernest Henley (Invictus)
β
since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world
my blood approves,
and kisses are a far better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
--the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says
we are for eachother: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph
And death i think is no parenthesis
β
β
E.E. Cummings
β
That life - whatever else it is - is short. That fate is cruel but maybe not random. That Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesnβt mean we have to bow and grovel to it. That maybe even if weβre not always so glad to be here, itβs our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open. And in the midst of our dying, as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesnβt touch.
β
β
Donna Tartt (The Goldfinch)
β
Do you think the universe fights for souls to be together?
Some things are too strange and strong to be coincidences.
β
β
Emery Allen
β
O, beware, my lord, of jealousy;
It is the green-ey'd monster, which doth mock
The meat it feeds on. That cuckold lives in bliss,
Who, certain of his fate, loves not his wronger:
But O, what damnèd minutes tells he o'er
Who dotes, yet doubts, suspects, yet strongly loves!
β
β
William Shakespeare (Othello)
β
Donβt worry if people think youβre crazy. You are crazy. You have that kind of intoxicating insanity that lets other people dream outside of the lines and become who theyβre destined to be.
β
β
Jennifer Elisabeth (Born Ready: Unleash Your Inner Dream Girl)
β
Maybe mistakes are what make our fate... without them what would shape our lives? Maybe if we had never veered off course we wouldn't fall in love, have babies, or be who we are. After all, things change, so do cities, people come into your life and they go. But it's comforting to know that the ones you love are always in your heart... and if you're very lucky, a plane ride away
β
β
Candace Bushnell (Sex and the City)
β
Albert grunted. "Do you know what happens to lads who ask too many questions?"
Mort thought for a moment.
"No," he said eventually, "what?"
There was silence.
Then Albert straightened up and said, "Damned if I know. Probably they get answers, and serve 'em right.
β
β
Terry Pratchett (Mort (Discworld, #4; Death, #1))
β
I figure the world is basically a machine. I don't know who made it, if it was the Fates, or the gods, or the capital-G god or whatever. But it chugs along the way it's supposed to most of the time. Sure, little pieces break off and stuff goes haywire once in a while, but mostly... things happen for a reason.
β
β
Rick Riordan (The House of Hades (The Heroes of Olympus, #4))
β
Iβm going to go back and stop your son from killing her.β
The queenβs face fell. For a moment, she looked as old as the years sheβd spent lying in a suspended state. βThat is not a small mistake to fix. If you do this, Time will take something equally valuable from you.β
The Fate gave the queen a look more vicious than any curse. βThere is nothing of equal value to me.
β
β
Stephanie Garber (The Ballad of Never After (Once Upon a Broken Heart, #2))
β
All the world's a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed.
β
β
SeΓ‘n O'Casey
β
I believe the simplest explanation is, there is no God. No one created the universe and no one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realization that there probably is no heaven and no afterlife either. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe and for that, I am extremely grateful.
β
β
Stephen Hawking
β
From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: that we are here for the sake of each other - above all for those upon whose smile and well-being our own happiness depends, and also for the countless unknown souls with whose fate we are connected by a bond of sympathy. Many times a day I realize how much my own outer and inner life is built upon the labors of my fellow men, both living and dead, and how earnestly I must exert myself in order to give in return as much as I have received.
β
β
Albert Einstein
β
These days, loneliness is the new cancerβa shameful, embarrassing thing, brought upon yourself in some obscure way. A fearful, incurable thing, so horrifying that you dare not mention it; other people donβt want to hear the word spoken aloud for fear that they might too be afflicted, or that it might tempt fate into visiting a similar horror upon them.
β
β
Gail Honeyman (Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine)
β
Do you ever wonder why things have to turn out the way they do?
β
β
Nicholas Sparks (A Walk to Remember)
β
Man is something that shall be overcome. Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman β a rope over an abyss. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end.
β
β
Friedrich Nietzsche (Thus Spoke Zarathustra)
β
Where you go, I shall go; where you die, I shall die, and there will I be buried.
β
β
Rosamund Hodge (Cruel Beauty)
β
I want to be the best version of myself for anyone who is going to someday walk into my life and need someone to love them beyond reason.
β
β
Jennifer Elisabeth (Born Ready: Unleash Your Inner Dream Girl)
β
Whatever happens, they say afterwards, it must have been fate. People are always a little confused about this, as they are in the case of miracles. When someone is saved from certain death by a strange concatenation of circumstances, they say that's a miracle. But of course if someone is killed by a freak chain of events -- the oil spilled just there, the safety fence broken just there -- that must also be a miracle. Just because it's not nice doesn't mean it's not miraculous.
β
β
Terry Pratchett (Interesting Times (Discworld, #17; Rincewind, #5))
β
Love has no middle term; either it destroys, or it saves. All human destiny is this dilemma. This dilemma, destruction or salvation, no fate proposes more inexorably than love. Love is life, if it is not death. Cradle; coffin, too. The same sentiment says yes and no in the human heart. Of all the things God has made, the human heart is the one that sheds most light, and alas! most night.
β
β
Victor Hugo (Les Miserables)
β
They send a person who can never stay," she whispered. "Who can never accept my offer of companionship for more than a little while. They send me a hero I can't help ... just the sort of person I can't help falling in love with."
...
As I sailed into the lake I realized the Fates really were cruel. They sent Calypso someone she couldn't help but love. But it worked both ways. For the rest of my life I would be thinking about her. She would always be my biggest what if.
β
β
Rick Riordan (The Battle of the Labyrinth (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, #4))
β
A breeze ruffled the neat hedges of Privet Drive, which lay silent and tidy under the inky sky, the very last place you would expect astonishing things to happen. Harry Potter rolled over inside his blankets without waking up. One small hand closed on the letter beside him and he slept on, not knowing he was special, not knowing he was famous, not knowing he would be woken in a few hours' time by Mrs. Dursley's scream as she opened the front door to put out the milk bottles, nor that he would spend the next few weeks being prodded and pinched by his cousin Dudley...He couldn't know that at this very moment, people meeting in secret all over the country were holding up their glasses and saying in hushed voices: "To Harry Potter - the boy who lived!
β
β
J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (Harry Potter, #1))
β
If God made all our faces, did he laugh when he made me?
Does he make the legs that cannot walk and eyes that cannot see?
Does he curl the hair upon my head 'til it rebels in wild defiance?
Does he close the ears of a deaf man to make him more reliant?
Is the way I look a coincidence or just a twist of fate?
If he made me this way, is it okay, to blame him for the things I hate?
For the flaws that seem to worsen every time I see a mirror,For the ugliness I see in me, for the loathing and the fear.
Does he sculpt us for his pleasure, for a reason I can't see?
If God makes all our faces, did he laugh when he made me?
β
β
Amy Harmon (Making Faces)
β
Sometimes the slightest things change the directions of our lives, the merest breath of a circumstance, a random moment that connects like a meteorite striking the earth. Lives have swiveled and changed direction on the strength of a chance remark.
β
β
Bryce Courtenay
β
I was in the biggest breakdown of my life when I stopped crying long enough to let the words of my epiphany really sink in. That whore, karma, had finally made her way around, and had just bitch-slapped me right across the face. The realization only made me cry harder.
β
β
Jennifer Salaiz
β
alone with everybody
the flesh covers the bone
and they put a mind
in there and
sometimes a soul,
and the women break
vases against the walls
and them men drink too
much
and nobody finds the
one
but they keep
looking
crawling in and out
of beds.
flesh covers
the bone and the
flesh searches
for more than
flesh.
there's no chance
at all:
we are all trapped
by a singular
fate.
nobody ever finds
the one.
the city dumps fill
the junkyards fill
the madhouses fill
the hospitals fill
the graveyards fill
nothing else
fills.
β
β
Charles Bukowski (Love Is a Dog from Hell)
β
Stood in firelight, sweltering. Bloodstain on chest like map of violent new continent. Felt cleansed. Felt dark planet turn under my feet and knew what cats know that makes them scream like babies in night.
Looked at sky through smoke heavy with human fat and God was not there. The cold, suffocating dark goes on forever and we are alone. Live our lives, lacking anything better to do. Devise reason later. Born from oblivion; bear children, hell-bound as ourselves, go into oblivion. There is nothing else.
Existence is random. Has no pattern save what we imagine after staring at it for too long. No meaning save what we choose to impose. This rudderless world is not shaped by vague metaphysical forces. It is not God who kills the children. Not fate that butchers them or destiny that feeds them to the dogs. Itβs us. Only us. Streets stank of fire. The void breathed hard on my heart, turning its illusions to ice, shattering them. Was reborn then, free to scrawl own design on this morally blank world.
Was Rorschach.
Does that answer your Questions, Doctor?
β
β
Alan Moore (Watchmen)
β
I believe everything happens for a reason. Whether it is decided by the Mother, or the Cauldron, or some sort of tapestry of Fate, I don't know. I don't really care. But I am grateful for it, whatever it is. Grateful that it brought you all into my life. If it hadn't... I might have become as awful as that prick we're going to face today. If I had not met an Illyrian warrior-in-training," he said to Cassian, "I would not have known the true depths of strength, of resilience, of honor and loyalty." Cassian's eyes gleamed bright. Rhys said to Azriel, "If I had not met a shadowsinger, I would not have known that it is the family you make, not the one you are born into, that matters. I would not have known what it is to truly hope, even when the world tells you to despair." Azriel bowed his head in thanks.
Mor was already crying when Rhys spoke to her. "If I had not met my cousin, I would neer have learned that light can be found in even the darkest of hells. That kidness can thrive even amongst cruelty." She wiped away her teas as she nodded.
I waited for Amren to offer a retort. But she was only waiting.
Rhys bowed his head to her. "If I had not met a tiny monster who hoards jewels more fiercely than a firedrake..." A quite laugh from all of us at that. Rhys smiled softly. "My own power would have consumed me long ago."
Rhys squeezed my hand as he looked to me at last. "And if I had not met my mate..." His words failed him as silver lined his eyes.
He said down the bond, I would have waited five hundred more years for you. A thousand years. And if this was all the time we were allowed to have... The wait was worth it.
He wiped away the tears sliding down my face. "I believe that everything happened, exactly the way it had to... so I could find you." He kissed another tear away.
β
β
Sarah J. Maas (A Court of Wings and Ruin (A Court of Thorns and Roses, #3))
β
WellβI have to say I personally have never drawn such a sharp line between βgoodβ and βbadβ as you. For me: that line is often false. The two are never disconnected. One canβt exist without the other. As long as I am acting out of love, I feel I am doing best I know how. But youβwrapped up in judgment, always regretting the past, cursing yourself, blaming yourself, asking βwhat if,β βwhat if.β βLife is cruel.β βI wish I had died instead of.β Wellβthink about this. What if all your actions and choices, good or bad, make no difference to God? What if the pattern is pre-set? No noβhang onβthis is a question worth struggling with. What if our badness and mistakes are the very thing that set our fate and bring us round to good? What if, for some of us, we canβt get there any other way?
β
β
Donna Tartt (The Goldfinch)
β
So we gave up. I'd finally had enough of chasing after a ghost who did not want to be discovered. We'd failed, maybe, but some mysteries aren't meant to be solved. I still did not know her as I wanted to, but I never could. She made it impossible for me. And the accident, the suicide, would never be anything else, and I was left to ask, Did I help you to a fate you didn't want, Alaska, or did I jsut assist in your willful self-destruction? Because they are different crimes, and I didn't know wheter to feel angry at myself for letting go.
But we knew what could be found out, and in finding out, she had made us closer- the Colonel adn Takumi and me, anyway. And that was it. She didn't leave me enough to discover her, but she left me enough to rediscover the Great Perhaps.
β
β
John Green (Looking for Alaska)
β
Everything is more complicated than you think. You only see a tenth of what is true. There are a million little strings attached to every choice you make; you can destroy your life every time you choose. But maybe you won't know for twenty years. And you'll never ever trace it to its source. And you only get one chance to play it out. Just try and figure out your own divorce. And they say there is no fate, but there is: it's what you create. Even though the world goes on for eons and eons, you are here for a fraction of a fraction of a second. Most of your time is spent being dead or not yet born. But while alive, you wait in vain, wasting years, for a phone call or a letter or a look from someone or something to make it all right. And it never comes or it seems to but doesn't really. And so you spend your time in vague regret or vaguer hope for something good to come along. Something to make you feel connected, to make you feel whole, to make you feel loved.
β
β
Charlie Kaufman (Synecdoche, New York: The Shooting Script)
β
It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living. Because we are alone with the unfamiliar presence that has entered us; because everything we trust and are used to is for a moment taken away from us; because we stand in the midst of a transition where we cannot remain standing. That is why the sadness passes: the new presence inside us, the presence that has been added, has entered our heart, has gone into its innermost chamber and is no longer even there, - is already in our bloodstream. And we don't know what it was. We could easily be made to believe that nothing happened, and yet we have changed, as a house that a guest has entered changes. We can't say who has come, perhaps we will never know, but many signs indicate that the future enters us in this way in order to be transformed in us, long before it happens. And that is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad: because the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment when our future steps into us is so much closer to life than that other loud and accidental point of time when it happens to us as if from outside. The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and serenely the new presence can enter us, and the more we can make it our own, the more it becomes our fate.
β
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Rainer Maria Rilke
β
The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.
The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man's mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.
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Cormac McCarthy (Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West)
β
Not one day in anyoneβs life is an uneventful day, no day without profound meaning, no matter how dull and boring it might seem, no matter whether you are a seamstress or a queen, a shoeshine boy, or a movie star, a renowned philosopher or a Downβs-syndrome child. Because in every day of your life, there are opportunities to perform little kindnesses for others, both by conscious acts of will and unconscious example. Each smallest act of kindnessβeven just words of hope when they are needed, the remembrance of a birthday, a compliment that engenders a smileβreverberates across great distances and spans of time, affecting lives unknown to the one whose generous spirit was the source of this good echo, because kindness is passed on and grows each time itβs passed, until a simple courtesy becomes an act of selfless courage years later and far away. Likewise, each small meanness, each thoughtless expression of hatred, each envious and bitter act, regardless of how petty, can inspire others, and is therefore the seed that ultimately produces evil fruit, poisoning people whom you have never met and never will. All human lives are so profoundly and intricately entwinedβthose dead, those living, those generations yet to comeβthat the fate of all is the fate of each, and the hope of humanity rests in every heart and in every pair of hands. Therefore, after every failure, we are obliged to strive again for success, and when faced with the end of one thing, we must build something new and better in the ashes, just as from pain and grief, we must weave hope, for each of us is a thread critical to the strengthβto the very survival of the human tapestry. Every hour in every life contains such often-unrecognized potential to affect the world that the great days and thrilling possibilities are combined always in this momentous day.
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Dean Koontz (From the Corner of His Eye)
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BLUE SWEATER
Bom Bom...
Bom Bom...
Bom Bom...
Do you hear that?
That's the sound of my heart beating...
Bom Bom...
Bom Bom...
Bom Bom...
Do you hear that? That's the sound of your heart beating.
It was the first day of October. I was wearing my blue sweater, you know the one I bought at Dillardβs? The one with a double knitted hem and holes in the ends of the sleeves that I could poke my thumbs through when it was cold but I didn't feel like wearing gloves? It was the same sweater you said made my eyes look like reflections of the stars on the ocean.
You promised to love me forever that night...
and boy
did you
ever!
It was the first day of December this time. I was wearing my blue sweater, you know the one I bought at Dillardβs? The one with a double knitted hem and holes in the ends of the sleeves that I could poke my thumbs through when it was cold but I didn't feel like wearing gloves? It was the same sweater you said made my eyes look like reflections of the stars on the ocean.
I told you I was three weeks late
You said it was fate.
You promised to love me forever that night...
and boy
did you
ever!
It was the first day of May. I was wearing my blue sweater, although this time the double stitched hem was worn
and the strength of each thread tested as they were pulled tight against my growing belly. You know the one. The same one I bought at Dillardβs? The one with holes in the ends of the
sleeves that I could poke my thumbs through when it was cold but I didn't feel like wearing gloves? It was the same sweater you said made my eyes look like reflections of the stars on the
ocean.
The SAME sweater you RIPPED off of my body as you shoved me to the
floor,
calling me a
whore
,
telling me
you didn't love me
anymore.
Bom Bom...
Bom Bom...
Bom Bom...
Do you hear that? That's the sound of my heart beating.
Bom Bom...
Bom Bom...
Bom Bom...
Do you hear that? That's the sound of your heart
beating.
(There is a long silence as she clasps her hands to her stomach, tears streaming down her face)
Do you hear that? Of course you don't. That's the silence
of my womb.
Because you
RIPPED
OFF
MY
SWEATER!
β
β
Colleen Hoover (Slammed (Slammed, #1))