Fate Series Quotes

That is life, isn’t it? Fate. Luck. Chance. A long series of what-if’s that lead from one moment to the next, time never pausing for you to catch your breath, to make sense of the cards that have been handed to you. And all you can do is play your cards and hope for the best, because in the end, it all comes back to those three basics. Fate. Luck. Chance.

Please do make your decisions in life and feel confident that they are right. However, if fate is involved, feel just as confident even if they aren’t.

It is my fate that some of my questions will never be answered.

Some people think destiny is something you cannot escape, such as death or a curdled cheesecake, both of which always turn up sooner or later.

I am alone this evening, and I am alone because of a cruel twist of fate, a phrase which here means that nothing has happened the way I thought it would. Once I was a content man, with a comfortable home, a successful career, a person I loved very much, and an extremely reliable typewriter, but all of those things have been taken away from me, and now the only trace I have of those happy days is the tattoo on my left ankle. As I sit in this very tiny room, printing these words with a very large pencil, I feel as if my whole life has been nothing but a dismal play, presented just for someone else’s amusement, and that the playwright who invented my cruel twist of fate is somewhere far above me, laughing and laughing at his creation.

So it’s fate then?” I asked with him so close my lips brushed the line of his jaw with each word, “Us being together?” “Absolutely,” Calvin said with a low growl. Then he lifted my chin, tilting my head back, and kissed me deeply. Who was I to argue with Fate?

Every sacred mission, every hunt for hidden relics, every pilgrimage from one end of the earth to the other … I was looking for you.

I swear I won't touch you even with a finger until you ask me yourself.

The words of men cannot be trusted, especially men like you!

I don't want you to leave. I want you to stay.

I have come to understand that life is composed of a series of coincidences. How we react to these - how we exercise what some refer to as free will - is everything; the choices we make within the boundaries of the twists of fate determine who we are.

A brave girl! And a unique one. The best that I have ever met in my life.

Don't be shy, dear. I'm too old for you to be embarrassed by me.

No mortal ever knows happiness and good fortune all the way to the end. Each one is born with his bitterness waiting for him.

You're very naive and innocent, and don't understand a lot of things yet.

Everyone thinks to the extent of their own depravity.

AGAMEMNON: Oh immovable law of heaven! Oh my anguish, my relentless fate! CLYTEMNESTRA: Yours? Mine. Hers. No relenting for any of us.

You are like a narcotic plant.

Where Destiny sets its path, Fate shall follow...:

Destiny. To believe that a life is meant for a single purpose, one must also believe in a common fate. Father to daughter, brother to sister, mother to child. Blood ties can be as unyielding as they are eternal. But it is our bonds of choice that truly light the road we travel. Love versus hatred. Loyalty against betrayal. A person's true destiny can only be revealed at the end of his journey, and the story I have to tell is far from over.

You can't push me away, mio cuore. You can't!

Scusi mia bella*, but it runs in the blood of all Italians to be skillful lovers. So you have to get used to this.

I cannot believe that you're still a girl. Your kisses don’t seem that innocent. They are driving me crazy.

Forget everything that surrounds you. Think that there’s just you and me in this wide world.

Stop smiling as if I’ve been acquainted with you for ages!

I think the word ‘pleasure’ is unknown to you. More precisely, its practical meaning.

I’m giving pleasure to you. Don’t interfere.

If you were three times poor, I would still have paid attention to you and fell head over heels in love with you.

She did not believe in fate; the world seemed far chancier than that, a series of mishaps and narrow escapes you somehow managed to survive until, one day, you didn't.

The road for hell for me is paved with everything I would do for you, and that list never fucking ends.

...life is composed of a series of coincidences. How we react to these - how we exercise what some refer to as free will - is everything; the choices we make within the boundaries of the twists of fate determine who we are.

And you haven’t got a ‘pause’ button, have you? You are just uncontrollable!

If you go on touching me, I’ll catch fire before your eyes.

If your parents left you, it doesn’t mean that other people will also do it to you.

I'm afraid that if we move on to such topics, I won't be able to let you go safe and sound.

Some say that to believe in destiny is to dismiss the role of free will. That self-determination cannot prevail in the presence of fate. When the truth is, the only part of destiny we can control is the fate we choose for another.

It has been said that a Stoic is someone who says “Fuck you” to fate. That’s right. They resist. They fight. They will not be made to do the wrong thing. Especially under pressure.

It's just like in a Brazilian serial! Destiny has brought us together.

I need only you, Milano, not your money.

Truly we are creatures of labor and suffering, and nothing for long. Labor and suffering, and the plain sight of our destiny is the cruelest thing of all.

Fate is a bitch with a wicked sense of humor... and today, I'm her punchline.

Life is mapped out by a series of choices and coincidences … miracles and fate are figments of a dreamer’s imagination.

Compatibility doesn't determine the fate of a marriage, how you deal with the incompatibilities, does.

I don’t know if it’s fate or a series of crazy coincidences that brought us together. But whatever led me to you isn’t as important as what will keep you here.

... life is a series of tiny, unavoidable decisions.

Come in, Bean." Come in Julian Delphiki, longed-for child of good and loving parents. Come in, kidnapped child, hostage of fate. Come and talk to the Fates, who are playing such clever little games with your life.

Without the discovery of Arnold's treason in the fall of 1780, the american people might never have been forced to realize that the real threat to their liberties came not from without but from within.

Between ourselves and our real natures we interpose that wax figure of idealizations and selections which we call our character. We extend this into all our thinking. Between us and the realities of social life we build up a mass of generalizations, abstract ideas, ancient glories, and personal wishes. They simplify and soften experience. It is so much easier to talk of poverty than to think of the poor, to argue the rights of capital than to see its results. Pretty soon we come to think of the theories and abstract ideas as things in themselves. We worry about their fate and forget their original content.

Ending a series is a difficult one .......where should a story that you have followed for so long end? When do you step away from the characters and let the readers decide their fate from there? When they can stand on their own is my only answer for that.

It's not easy being the Chosen One. Just ask Buffy Summers. Ask Harry Potter. And ask Zoey Redbird, the latest in this list of "lucky" candidates picked by fate to save the world from darkness- and oh yeah, find romance, keep their friends and maybe not flunk every class. In their spare time of course.

It’s been a very long week without you, sweetheart,” He said against her lips as he lowered her into the bed. “It felt like years,” She hissed against his lips.

Fate is like a strange, unpopular restaurant, filled with odd waiters who bring you things you never asked for and don’t always like.

Fate was but one more world-born subterfuge, another lie men used to give meaning to their abject helplessness.

Did you feel it? Did you feel the darkness in their souls and their countless evil deeds? Their fate was to die in my grasp, beneath the sting of my bite.

That’s the thing about wishes, though—they’re just that. Hopes thrown out to the universe, swept away on a breeze and left up to fate.

She couldn't detach from him, couldn't catch her breath, and didn't want to. Not ever again.

There, the sublime, unreachable mysteries of the Universe are haggled over by poor finite minds who cannot call their lives their own. There, nation wars against nation, creed against creed, soul against soul. Alas, fated planet! how soon shalt thou be extinct, and thy place shall know thee no more!

An intelligent observation of the facts of human existence will reveal to shallow-minded folk who sneer at the use of coincidence in the arts of fiction and drama that life itself is little more than a series of coincidences. Open the history of the past at whatsoever page you will, and there you shall find coincidence at work bringing about events that the merest chance might have averted. Indeed, coincidence may be defined as the very tool used by Fate to shape the destiny of men and nations. Observe it now at work in the affairs of Captain Blood and of some others.

IT’S A FUNNY THING TO be the product of a fairy-tale romance. It’s another thing to think you might find one yourself. You can read the stories and watch the movies, and you can think you know how it’s all supposed to unfold. But the truth is, love is as much fate as it is planning, as much a beauty as it is a disaster. Finding a prince might mean kissing a lot of frogs. Or kicking a lot of frogs out of your house. Falling might mean running headfirst into something you always wanted. Or dipping your toe into something you’ve been scared of your whole life. Happily ever after could be waiting in a field a mile wide. Or a window as narrow as seven minutes'.

Once again, God has a purpose. A desire. A goal. And God never stops pursuing it. Jesus tells a series of parables in Luke 15 about a woman who loses a coin, a shepherd who loses a sheep, and a father who loses a son. The stories aren’t ultimately about things and people being lost; the stories are about things and people being found. The God that Jesus teaches us about doesn’t give up until everything that was lost is found. This God simply doesn’t give up. Ever.

Science has provided the possibility of liberation for human beings from hard labor, but science itself is not a liberator. It creates means not goals. Man should use [Science] for reasonable goals. When the ideals of humanity are war and conquest, those tools become as dangerous as a razor in the hands of a child of three. We must not condemn man’s inventiveness and patient conquest of the forces of nature because they are being used wrongly and disobediently now. The fate of humanity is entirely dependent upon its moral development.

Abandoned? Alia…” She raised her hands to halt his words. She could do this. She could be biddable and calm. Fighting the words at the tip of her lips, she took a quiet breath.

If you truly dare to desire something even the seasons will align your fate to make it happen.

In another kingdom, her secrets wouldn't matter.

Brown made a claim that possibly hit a little too close to home. 'Money is this man's god,' the handbill read, 'and to get enough of it, he would sacrifice his country.

What do people think of when they talk about their lives? Do they really see them as an integral whole, as a chronological sequence of events; as something logical, purposeful, completed? What moments do they remember, and how do they remember them? As words? As a series of images and sounds? My life crumbles into a series of pictures, unconnected scenes which comes to mind only occassionally and at random. But there are key events, the acts of chance or fate, which later enable me to construct a logical whole of my life. One such moment was meeting Jose. The other was my decision to see our love through to the very end.

Swords, Lances, arrows, machine guns, and even high explosives have had far less power over the fates of nations than the typhus louse, the plague flea, and the yellow-fever mosquito. Civilizations have retreated from the plasmodium of malaria, and armies have crumbled into rabbles under the onslaught of cholera spirilla, or of dysentery and typhoid bacilli. Huge areas have bee devastated by the trypanosome that travels on the wings of the tsetse fly, and generations have been harassed by the syphilis of a courtier. War and conquest and that herd existence which is an accompaniment of what we call civilization have merely set the stage for these more powerful agents of human tragedy.

It can get a little complicated when you have the expectation that you’re supposed to live Happily Ever After with this person when they were designed to stay with you for just a little while. Our Master designs it this way so you make the most of the relationship when you have it. She thought all soul mates were meant to be forever, when some soul mates are just meant to be.

We meet in a place where time stands still. You recall where you were when the call came in. The vivid colors of the day. The season. The way the sun was streaming in or rain falling on the glass. That’s how you know it was your destiny. You can remember all the tiny details of your meeting. And you thought it wouldn’t matter.

The failure of decision makers to grapple with the inner workings of their own minds, and their desire to indulge their gut feelings, made it “quite likely that the fate of entire societies may be sealed by a series of avoidable mistakes committed by their leaders.

Yet her experience had consisted less in a series of pure disappointments than in a series of substitutions. Continually it had happened that what she had desired had not been granted her, and that what had been granted her she had not desired. So she viewed with an approach to equanimity the now cancelled days when Donald had been her undeclared lover, and wondered what unwished-for thing Heaven might send her in place of him.

You are a Chosen Man. You are Parmenion, the Death of Nations. A hundred thousand souls will you send to the dark river, screaming and wailing, lamenting their fate. It is right and just that you should know your choices.

Thomas Paine was so inspired by the heroism displayed at Fort Mifflin that he published an open letter to William Howe: 'You are fighting for what you can never obtain and we are defending what we never mean to part with.

Because Time has been around for a long time, it often gets bored. In order to briefly relieve its boredom, Time enjoys constructing massively unlikely series of events. If the events are of the romantic kind, they're called Fate, and if they are of the negative kind, we call them Unfortunate Coincidence.

He had read once that sleep does to the cerebellum what waves do to the ocean. Sleep sparks a series of pulses across the webs of neurons, pulses like waves; it washes out what is unnecessary and leaves only what’s important behind. [It

William: What are you looking for in a woman? Reyes: I’ve found my angel, Danika. She’s all I need. William: Really? That’s, like, weird to me. Men should need many girls. No one girl should be so important. Reyes: How sad for you. William: I’m not sad. You’re sad! Reyes: Why are you so defensive about this? William: Let’s move on. Favorite outfit? Reyes: First, you said girls rather than women. Why is that, I wonder? Because you care about one girl in particular? Anyway, clothes are clothes. I don’t have any favorites. William: Go to hell. I care about no one and I’m proud to admit that! Favorite moment in the series so far? Reyes: The first time Danika looked at me with trust and acceptance in her eyes. I’m still reeling. William: And just so you know, girl was a slip of the tongue. Now. Least favorite moment in the series? Reyes: Every time I had to kill Maddox. William: Really? That would have been my favorite. Anyway, hobbies? Reyes: Do you really have to ask? Yes? Fine. Cutting myself. I’ve started to draw shapes. Like hearts. William: You actually admitted that aloud. [snicker] [..] Reyes: Happy for the first time in what seems an eternity. William: Not that you deserve it. Really, I didn’t say girl for any particular reason. So what do you think of the fact that your home has been invaded by women? Reyes: As long as I have Danika, I don’t care who lives with us. William: Who do you think is the smartest Lord? Reyes: Me. Look who I picked to spend eternity with. William: I think you’re the dumbest! Seriously, girl was meant to encompass everyone old enough to be bedded by me. Now, if you knew you only had twenty-four hours before the Hunters found Pandora’s box and killed you, what would you do in the time you had left to live? Reyes: Not even death can keep me away from my angel. I would find a way to change such a fate. Again. William: What kind of underwear are you wearing? Note from William: Bastard flipped me off and left. Final thoughts from William: Reyes’s thoughts about me and my slip of the tongue were ridiculous and unfounded!

But to deny fate is arrogance, to declare that we are the sole shapers of our existence is madness;if you deny fate life becomes the series of missed opportunities, a regret for what never was and could have been, a remorse of what was not done and could have been done, and the present is wasted, twisted into another missed oppurtunity.

Don't be shy, dear. I'm too old for you to be embarrassed by me.” #RicardoAlonso , #FatefulItalianPassion.

Everyone thinks to the extent of their own depravity,” #HenriettaLedyanova , #FatefulItalianPassion .

Anna Petrovna: I am beginning to think, doctor, that fate has cheated me. The majority of people, who maybe are no better than I am, are happy and pay nothing for that happiness. I have paid for everything, absolutely everything! And how dearly! Why have I paid such terrible interest?

Still another factor is compatibility with vested interests. This book, like probably every other typed document you have ever read, was typed with a QWERTY keyboard, named for the left-most six letters in its upper row. Unbelievable as it may now sound, that keyboard layout was designed in 1873 as a feat of anti-engineering. It employs a whole series of perverse tricks designed to force typists to type as slowly as possible, such as scattering the commonest letters over all keyboard rows and concentrating them on the left side (where right-handed people have to use their weaker hand). The reason behind all of those seemingly counterproductive features is that the typewriters of 1873 jammed if adjacent keys were struck in quick succession, so that manufacturers had to slow down typists. When improvements in typewriters eliminated the problem of jamming, trials in 1932 with an efficiently laid-out keyboard showed that it would let us double our typing speed and reduce our typing effort by 95 percent. But QWERTY keyboards were solidly entrenched by then. The vested interests of hundreds of millions of QWERTY typists, typing teachers, typewriter and computer salespeople, and manufacturers have crushed all moves toward keyboard efficiency for over 60 years.

The act of living one's own destiny includes a series of stages that are far beyond our understanding, whose objective is always to... make us learn the lessons necessary to fulfill our own destiny.

The spinner of my story set me on a collision course that began the night I walked into the Red Iguana, and it was sealed after escaping death’s clutches the day of the comet, but none of those fateful events would have happened if I hadn’t fallen in love with science. Just like in the movie, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, I believe a series of events resulted in leading me to find my soulmate.

what I didn’t know, or rather had absolutely no conception of, was that every step I took was defining me, every person I encountered leaving their mark on me, and that the life I was living at that particular time, boundlessly arbitrary as it seemed, was in fact my life. That one day I would look back on my life, and this would be what I looked back on. What then had been insignificant, as weightless as air, a series of events dissolving in exactly the same way as the darkness dissolved in the mornings, would twenty years on seem laden with destiny and fate.

People handle things differently, and everybody grieves differently, okay? No, I never considered taking my life, but think about it. What did I do? I did the very same thing you almost did. Maybe not literally but I made the decision to stop living. I went through the motions of waking and working and continuing with my life, but I wasn’t living. I didn’t even realize it until you came along. This is living.” He kissed her softly because he’d just had a huge revelation. “What I was doing before you . . . Baby, I may as well have been dead. My life now with you compared to what it was then . . . I was dead.

Aaron was beside himself grabbing his keys and running out of his office leaving everyone staring at him. He heard Becca call his name but he didn't have the time, Nia needed him and he had to go now! He felt like he was suffocating as he started the car and pushed the gas down as far as it would go. This guardian bond thing was more intense than he ever thought possible.

The last five years had been a series of carefully orchestrated events. Every move, every strategy had been poured over in painstaking detail before it was set into motion. Pieces on a chess board. A collision of fate and circumstance. I’d planned for every hitch. Every contingency. Except the one that blindsided me like a vat of acid to the face. I fell in love with her.

To the skeptics, perhaps the events that are to follow were just a coincidence and nothing more than a series of random accidents that led me to where I am today. But to the lovers and poets and dreamers, perhaps you might agree that the story about to unfold is something more. You might even agree that there are times when coincidences are so powerful that they don’t really seem like coincidences anymore. Times when you come across events that seem too strange, or too strong, to be anything other than Fate—a grand design that incorporates everything from the career paths we take, the friends we meet along the way, and the partners we choose to spend our lives with. Times like these make you question that maybe nothing in this world happens by accident. Maybe everything really does happen for a reason, as some prewritten destiny slowly takes shape and shoves you down a path—or in my case, a mountain side.

Many lose their paths, blinded by evolution. Addiction to power is like any other addiction; you’ll just want it more. That earthquake, ninety years ago, spared few to record it for the next generation. Humans sinned. Persistently existing in clogged colonies was their sin. The series of quakes lasted a week; each shake came in between long intervals. Oh! Those intervals! A week of despair and questions. Why did I survive? Why did fate save me and not them? Will fate save me the next time? Uncertainty—not for food or shelter, but for life. Fear of death. Fear of living alone. He was a child back then. Him and Ruem. “Win your fear, and you’ll evolve.” Their Master’s voice lulls the Monk in his mind.

If there is a personal fate, there is no higher destiny or at least there is but one which he concludes is inevitable and despicable. For the rest, he knows himself to be the master of his days. At that subtle moment when man glances backward over his life, Sisyphus returning towards his rock, in that slight pivoting, he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which becomes his fate, created by him, combined under his memory’s eye and soon sealed by his death.

ONLY a few areas of the world developed food production independently, and they did so at widely differing times. From those nuclear areas, hunter-gatherers of some neighboring areas learned food production, and peoples of other neighboring areas were replaced by invading food producers from the nuclear areas—again at widely differing times. Finally, peoples of some areas ecologically suitable for food production neither evolved nor acquired agriculture in prehistoric times at all; they persisted as hunter-gatherers until the modern world finally swept upon them. The peoples of areas with a head start on food production thereby gained a head start on the path leading toward guns, germs, and steel. The result was a long series of collisions between the haves and the have-nots of history.

And I still say it was just a coincidence;' he muttered pugnaciously. 'You say it too! Look at me and say it! It was just a coincidence. That happened to be the nearest place on the dial where they both met exactly, those two hands. My blows dented them. They got stuck there just as the works died, that was all. Stay sane whatever you do. Say it over and over. It was just a coincidence!' Outside the tall French windows, in the velvety night-sky, the stars in all their glory twinkled derisively in at them. ("Speak To Me Of Death")

We are Evolution. We are the Revolution. We have come to revalue all values. It’s time to get off your knees. Friends, fellow gods and goddesses, it’s time to rise. Join our Sacred Cause. Transform this world. Undergo the ultimate personal and collective metamorphosis. The old gods are dead. We are the new gods. On whose side will you stand on the fateful fields of Armageddon? Will you support the evil tyrants of the past, or will you make your stand shoulder to shoulder with those who will never serve any gods but will instead become gods themselves?

Once I was a content man, with a comfortable home, a successful career, a person I loved very much, and an extremely reliable typewriter, but all of those things have been taken away from me, and now the only trace I have of those happy days is the tattoo on my left ankle. As I sit in this very tiny room, printing these words with this very large pencil, I feel as if my whole life has been nothing but a dismal play, presented just for someone else’s amusement, and that the playwright who invented my cruel twist of fate is somewhere far above me, laughing and laughing at his creation.

We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death, and afraid of each other. Our age yields no great and perfect persons. We want men and women who shall renovate life and our social state, but we see that most natures are insolvent, cannot satisfy their own wants, have an ambition out of all proportion to their practical force, and do lean and beg day and night continually. Our housekeeping is mendicant, our arts, our occupations, our marriages, our religion, we have not chosen, but society has chosen for us. We are parlour soldiers. We shun the rugged battle of fate, where strength is born.

God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that His justice cannot sleep forever. Commerce between master and slave is despotism. Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free. Establish the law for educating the common people. This it is the business of the state to effect and on a general plan.

Newton had invented the calculus, which was expressed in the language of "differential equations," which describe how objects smoothly undergo infinitesimal changes in space and time. The motion of ocean waves, fluids, gases, and cannon balls could all be expressed in the language of differential equations. Maxwell set out with a clear goal, to express the revolutionary findings of Faraday and his force fields through precise differential equations. Maxwell began with Faraday's discovery that electric fields could turn into magnetic fields and vice versa. He took Faraday's depictions of force fields and rewrote them in the precise language of differential equations, producing one of the most important series of equations in modern science. They are a series of eight fierce-looking differential equations. Every physicist and engineer in the world has to sweat over them when mastering electromagnetism in graduate school. Next, Maxwell asked himself the fateful question: if magnetic fields can turn into electric fields and vice versa, what happens if they are constantly turning into each other in a never-ending pattern? Maxwell found that these electric-magnetic fields would create a wave, much like an ocean wave. To his astonishment, he calculated the speed of these waves and found it to be the speed of light! In 1864, upon discovering this fact, he wrote prophetically: "This velocity is so nearly that of light that it seems we have strong reason to conclude that light itself...is an electromagnetic disturbance.

This seat taken?" My eyes grazing over the only other occupant, a guy with long glossy dark hair with his head bent over a book. "It's all yours," he says. And when he lifts his head and smiles,my heart just about leaps from my chest. It's the boy from my dreams. The boy from the Rabbit Hole,the gas station,and the cave-sitting before me with those same amazing,icy-blue eues, those same alluring lips I've kissed multiple times-but only in slumber, never in waking life. I scold my heart to settle,but it doesn't obey. I admonish myself to sit,to act normal, casual-and I just barely succeed. Stealing a series of surreptitious looks as I search through my backpack, taking in his square chin,wide generous lips,strong brow,defined cheekbones, and smooth brown skin-the exact same features as Cade. "You're the new girl,right?" He abandons his book,tilting his head in a way that causes his hair to stream over his shoulder,so glossy and inviting it takes all of my will not to lean across the table and touch it. I nod in reply,or at least I think I do.I can't be too sure.I'm too stricken by his gaze-the way it mirrors mine-trying to determine if he knows me, recognizes me,if he's surprised to find me here.Wishing Paloma had better prepared me-focused more on him and less on his brother. I force my gaze from his.Bang my knee hard against the table as I swivel in my seat.Feeling so odd and unsettled,I wish I'd picked another place to sit, though it's pretty clear no other table would have me. He buries his smile and returns to the book.Allowing a few minutes to pass,not nearly enough time for me to get a grip on myself,when he looks up and says, "Are you staring at me because you've seen my doppelganer roaming the halls,playing king of the cafeteria? Or because you need to borrow a pencil and you're too shy to ask?" I clear the lump from my throat, push the words past my lips when I say, "No one's ever accused me of being shy." A statement that,while steeped in truth, stands at direct odds with the way I feel now,sitting so close to him. "So I guess it's your twin-or doppelganer,as you say." I keep my voice light, as though I'm not at all affected by his presence,but the trill note at the end gives me away.Every part of me now vibrating with the most intense surge of energy-like I've been plugged into the wall and switched on-and it's all I can do to keep from grabbing hold of his shirt, demanding to know if he dreamed the dreams too. He nods,allowing an easy,cool smile to widen his lips. "We're identical," he says. "As I'm sure you've guessed. Though it's easy enough to tell us apart. For one thing,he keeps his hair short.For another-" "The eyes-" I blurt,regretting the words the instant they're out.From the look on his face,he has no idea what I'm talking about. "Yours are...kinder." My cheeks burn so hot I force myself to look away,as words of reproach stampede my brain. Why am I acting like such an inept loser? Why do I insist on embarrassing myself-in front of him-of all people? I have to pull it together.I have to remember who I am-what I am-and what I was born to do.Which is basically to crush him and his kind-or,at the very least,to temper the damage they do.

The United States had been created through an act of disloyalty. No matter how eloquently the Declaration of Independence had attempted to justify the American rebellion, a residual guilt hovered over the circumstances of the country's founding. Arnold changed all that. By threatening to destroy the newly created republic through, ironically, his own betrayal, Arnold gave this nation of traitors the greatest of gifts; a myth of creation. The American people had come to revere George Washington, but a hero alone was not sufficient to bring them together. Now they had the despised villain Benedict Arnold. They knew both what they were fighting for - and against. The story of American's genesis could finally move beyond the break with the mother country and start to focus on the process by which thirteen former colonies could become a nation. As Arnold had demonstrated, the real enemy was not Great Britain, but those Americans who sought to undercut their fellow citizens commitment to one another. Whether it was Joseph Reed's willingness to promote his state's interests at the expenses of what was best for the country as a whole or Arnold's decision to sell his loyalty to the highest bidder, the greatest danger to America's future cam from self-serving opportunism masquerading as patriotism. At this fragile state in the country's development, a way had to be found to strengthen rather than destroy the existing framework of government. The Continental Congress was far from perfect, but it offered a start to what could one day be a great nation. By turning traitor, Arnold had alerted the American people to how close they had all come to betraying the Revolution by putting their own interests ahead of their newborn country's. Already the name Benedict Arnold was becoming a byword for that most hateful of crimes: treason against the people of the United States.

Paint in several colors was squeezed out of tubes and mixed and applied to woven fabric stretched on a wooden frame so artfully we say we see a woman hanging out a sheet rather than oil on canvas. Ana Teresa Fernandez’s image on that canvas is six feet tall, five feet wide, the figure almost life-size. Though it is untitled, the series it’s in has a title: Telaraña. Spiderweb. The spiderweb of gender and history in which the painted woman is caught; the spiderweb of her own power that she is weaving in this painting dominated by a sheet that was woven. Woven now by a machine, but before the industrial revolution by women whose spinning and weaving linked them to spiders and made spiders feminine in the old stories. In this part of the world, in the creation stories of the Hopi, Pueblo, Navajo, Choctaw, and Cherokee peoples, Spider Grandmother is the principal creator of the universe. Ancient Greek stories included an unfortunate spinning woman who was famously turned into a spider as well as the more powerful Greek fates, who spun, wove, and cut each person’s lifeline, who ensured that those lives would be linear narratives that end. Spiderwebs are images of the nonlinear, of the many directions in which something might go, the many sources for it; of the grandmothers as well as the strings of begats. There’s a German painting from the nineteenth century of women processing the flax from which linen is made. They wear wooden shoes, dark dresses, demure white caps, and stand at various distances from a wall, where the hanks of raw material are being wound up as thread. From each of them, a single thread extends across the room, as though they were spiders, as though it came right out of their bellies. Or as though they were tethered to the wall by the fine, slim threads that are invisible in other kinds of light. They are spinning, they are caught in the web. To spin the web and not be caught in it, to create the world, to create your own life, to rule your fate, to name the grandmothers as well as the fathers, to draw nets and not just straight lines, to be a maker as well as a cleaner, to be able to sing and not be silenced, to take down the veil and appear: all these are the banners on the laundry line I hang out.