Fortune Teller Quotes

Whether a man is a legend or not is decided by history, not fortune tellers.

Dreams are illustrations... from the book your soul is writing about you.

You will be fine,' the fortune teller says. 'There may be decisions to make and surprises in store. Life takes us to unexpected places sometimes. The future is never set in stone, remember that.

When I was twelve, a fortune teller told me that my one true love would die young and leave me all alone.. Everyone said she was a fraud, that she was just making it up.. I’d really like to know why the hell a person would make up a thing like that.

Every man has his destiny. But who needs to go to a fortune-teller to find it? Do I go to a chef to find out if I'm hungry?

So,” Marasi said, “you traded a dead man’s scarf for another dead man’s gun. But…the gun itself belonged to someone dead, so by the same logic—” “Don’t try,” Waxillium said. “Logic doesn’t work on Wayne.” “I bought a ward against it off a traveling fortune-teller,” Wayne explained. “It lets me add two ’n’ two and get a pickle.

Every fortune-teller I ever met was a faker. First thing you should do to a soothsayer is poke them in the eye and say, ‘Didn’t see that coming, did you?

One writes because one has been touched by the yearning for and the despair of ever touching the Other.

Ordinary fortune-tellers tell you what you want to happen; witches tell you what’s going to happen whether you want it to or not. Strangely enough, witches tend to be more accurate but less popular.

Before you leave, the fortune teller reminds you that the future is never set in stone.

At the end of the street was a large glass box with a female mannequin inside it, dressed as a gypsy fortune teller. “Now,” said Wednesday, “at the start of any quest or enterprise it behooves us to consult the Norns.” He dropped a coin into the slot. With jagged, mechanical motions, the gypsy lifted her arm and lowered it once more. A slip of paper chunked out of the slot. Wednesday took it, read it, grunted, folded it up and put it in his pocket. “Aren’t you going to show it to me? I’ll show you mine,” said Shadow. “A man’s fortune is his own affair,” said Wednesday, stiffly. “I would not ask to see yours.” Shadow put his own coin into the slot. He took his slip of paper. He read it. EVERY ENDING IS A NEW BEGINNING. YOUR LUCKY NUMBER IS NONE. YOUR LUCKY COLOUR IS DEAD. Motto: LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON. Shadow made a face. He folded the fortune up and put it inside his pocket.

Unless you are a fortune-teller, long-term business planning is a fantasy

She'll tell herself that what she really wanted was not to live forever, but to stop worrying. 'What if I change?' she asked the fortune teller, all those years ago, sure that knowledge could save her from bad luck and tragedy. 'Most people don't,' the woman said.

Cities have always offered anonymity, variety, and conjunction, qualities best basked in by walking: one does not have to go into the bakery or the fortune-teller's, only to know that one might. A city always contains more than any inhabitant can know, and a great city always makes the unknown and the possible spurs to the imagination.

I think the difference between a lie and a story is that a story utilizes the trappings and appearance of truth for the interest of the listener as well as of the teller. A story has in it neither gain nor loss. But a lie is a device for profit or escape. I suppose if that definition is strictly held to, then a writer of stories is a liar - if he is financially fortunate.

So, apart from casting runes, what other hobbies do you have? Forbidden rituals, human sacrifices, torturing? –

The fortune teller gazed into my eyes and whispered, "Your deepest desire will come true tonight." When I came home, I found my wife's dead body lying in her own blood.

Every place is a goldmine. You have only to give yourself time, sit in a teahouse watching the passers-by, stand in a corner of the market, go for a haircut. You pick up a thread – a word, a meeting, a friend of a friend of someone you have just met – and soon the most insipid, most insignificant place becomes a mirror of the world, a window on life, a theatre of humanity.

This was how I would die. Strangled by an attractive, seminaked woman inside a fridge with a giant tarantula in the middle of a sea of carnivorous jam. As I blacked out, all I could think of was a fortune teller I'd spoken to a few years ago, and how full of shit she'd turned out to be.

In their effort to divorce language and experience, deconstructionist critics remind me of middle-class parents who do not allow their children to play in the street.

But here is a question that is troubling me: if there is no God, then, one may ask, who governs human life and, in general, the whole order of things on earth? – Man governs it himself, – Homeless angrily hastened to reply to this admittedly none-too-clear question. – Pardon me, – the stranger responded gently, – but in order to govern, one needs, after all, to have a precise plan for a certain, at least somewhat decent, length of time. Allow me to ask you, then, how can man govern, if he is not only deprived of the opportunity of making a plan for at least some ridiculously short period, well, say, a thousand years , but cannot even vouch for his own tomorrow? And in fact, – here the stranger turned to Berlioz, – imagine that you, for instance, start governing, giving orders to others and yourself, generally, so to speak, acquire a taste for it, and suddenly you get ...hem ... hem ... lung cancer ... – here the foreigner smiled sweetly, and if the thought of lung cancer gave him pleasure — yes, cancer — narrowing his eyes like a cat, he repeated the sonorous word —and so your governing is over! You are no longer interested in anyone’s fate but your own. Your family starts lying to you. Feeling that something is wrong, you rush to learned doctors, then to quacks, and sometimes to fortune-tellers as well. Like the first, so the second and third are completely senseless, as you understand. And it all ends tragically: a man who still recently thought he was governing something, suddenly winds up lying motionless in a wooden box, and the people around him, seeing that the man lying there is no longer good for anything, burn him in an oven. And sometimes it’s worse still: the man has just decided to go to Kislovodsk – here the foreigner squinted at Berlioz – a trifling matter, it seems, but even this he cannot accomplish, because suddenly, no one knows why, he slips and falls under a tram-car! Are you going to say it was he who governed himself that way? Would it not be more correct to think that he was governed by someone else entirely?

Never in any Jane Austen novel did the love interest pretend to be a fortune-teller," Helen said, "Why would someone do that?

Being the soothsayer of the tribe is a dirty job, but someone has to do it.

CUSTOMER: I’d love to write a book. BOOKSELLER: Then you should write one. CUSTOMER: I really don’t have the time. BOOKSELLER: I’m sure you could make time. CUSTOMER: No, you don’t get it; I really don’t have the time. I had my fortune read on Monday, and the fortune teller lady said that I’m going to get knocked down by a bus next week. She said that it’ll probably kill me BOOKSELLER: ... Oh. Well, er, that doesn’t sound very nice. CUSTOMER: No, it doesn’t, does it? It’s really annoying, too, ’cause I’d booked a holiday for next month, and I was really looking forward to it.

The ambition of much of today's literary theory seems to be to find ways to read literature without imagination.

A true confession: I believe in a soluble fish.

Fortune-tellers aren't like you and me. They see the world as it could be, and sometimes they try to bring about what they want, rather than what should be.

She believes in the words of her fortune teller, but really, anyone could have told her that if you have to stop doing the thing you love, it will kill you.

What’s going to happen?” asked Rhea.  “I was a witch, not a fortune teller,” said Maria testily. “No one knows what’s going to happen.

Per i prossimo dieci anni la tua vita sarà orribile, avrai grandi problemi e niente ti andrà bene", dice l'indovino. "E poi?", chiede ansioso il cliente. "Poi? Poi ci farai l'abitudine!

It's an invention, a fairy tale devoid of any sense, like all the legends in which good spirits and fortune tellers fulfill wishes. Stories like that are made up by poor simpletons, who can't even dream of fulfilling their wishes and desires themselves. I'm pleased you're not one of them, Geralt of Rivia. It makes you closer in spirit to me. If I want something, I don't dream of it—I act. And I always get what I want.

whether a man is a legend or not is decided by history, not fortune-tellers.

A fortune teller long ago warned him he would die in Egypt, and she walks like an Egyptian.

Originally, Tarot had been devised as a secret means to pass along ideologies banned by the Church. Now, Tarot's mystical qualities were passed on by modern fortune-tellers.

Your NOT FALLING APART, i tell my self. IF ONLY YOU KNEW, its HARDER TO BREATH with out you. THE AIR I BREATH is not the same with out you. I dont want to LOVE SOMEBODY else. MAKES ME WONDER if i could ever tell you, but I'm OUT OF GOODBYES. I don't want to lose you. This is MISERY, I CANT LIE, i am LOSING MY MIND over you. NOTHING LAST FOREVER, but THIS LOVE dose. Its a TANGLED mystery. ONE MORE NIGHT goes bye with no reply. The FORTUNE TELLER said you would never be mine. I end up BACK AT YOUR DOOR, when THE SUN comes back to life. This is are LAST CHANCE, RUNAWAY with me tonight. And lets never say goodbye.

They say a basis in fact underlies most legends. They say it all the time, all those Wise Elders in all those old horror films, the high priests, the scientists, the gypsy fortune tellers. On this single issue they agree unanimously.

I take the knife and stab myself in the neck. I bleed out on top of the fortune-teller’s grave and then I’m dead and that’s my game. I am OK and I’ll be OK but this is the end and this is my story. CH.

THEORY OF MEMORY Long, long ago, before I was a tormented artist, afflicted with longing yet incapable of forming durable attachments, long before this, I was a glorious ruler uniting all of a divided country—so I was told by the fortune-teller who examined my palm. Great things, she said, are ahead of you, or perhaps behind you; it is difficult to be sure. And yet, she added, what is the difference? Right now you are a child holding hands with a fortune-teller. All the rest is hypothesis and dream.

La mobilità sociale ha aperto a tutti la possibilità di aspirare a qualsiasi cosa, ma con ciò nessuno è più "predestinato" a nulla. È forse per questo che la gente è sempre più disorientata e incerta sul senso della propria vita.

Table 3–1. Definitions of Cognitive Distortions 1. ALL-OR-NOTHING THINKING: You see things in black-and-white categories. If your performance falls short of perfect, you see yourself as a total failure. 2. OVERGENERALIZATION: You see a single negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat. 3. MENTAL FILTER: You pick out a single negative detail and dwell on it exclusively so that your vision of all reality becomes darkened, like the drop of ink that colors the entire beaker of water. 4. DISQUALIFYING THE POSITIVE: You reject positive experiences by insisting they “don’t count” for some reason or other. In this way you can maintain a negative belief that is contradicted by your everyday experiences. 5. JUMPING TO CONCLUSIONS: You make a negative interpretation even though there are no definite facts that convincingly support your conclusion. a. Mind reading. You arbitrarily conclude that someone is reacting negatively to you, and you don’t bother to check this out. b. The Fortune Teller Error. You anticipate that things will turn out badly, and you feel convinced that your prediction is an already-established fact. 6. MAGNIFICATION (CATASTROPHIZING) OR MINIMIZATION: You exaggerate the importance of things (such as your goof-up or someone else’s achievement), or you inappropriately shrink things until they appear tiny (your own desirable qualities or the other fellow’s imperfections). This is also called the “binocular trick.” 7. EMOTIONAL REASONING: You assume that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are: “I feel it, therefore it must be true.” 8. SHOULD STATEMENTS: You try to motivate yourself with shoulds and shouldn’ts, as if you had to be whipped and punished before you could be expected to do anything. “Musts” and “oughts” are also offenders. The emotional consequence is guilt. When you direct should statements toward others, you feel anger, frustration, and resentment. 9. LABELING AND MISLABELING: This is an extreme form of overgeneralization. Instead of describing your error, you attach a negative label to yourself: “I’m a loser.” When someone else’s behavior rubs you the wrong way, you attach a negative label to him: “He’s a goddam louse.” Mislabeling involves describing an event with language that is highly colored and emotionally loaded. 10. PERSONALIZATION: You see yourself as me cause of some negative external event which in fact you were not primarily responsible for.

♔ Writing is my passion. I never want to let it go. It may be short, Fan-Fiction or purely my own work. But it is my kingdom, I am the princess. For all the noble readers in the kingdom, I bring them joy with tales. My knights that protect me, are my fellow writers. The dragon would be the inspiration for my writing. The fortune teller would be my best friend, giving me hope. The castle would be Wattpad, it keeps everything protected. ♔

Perhaps it is only in childhood that books have any deep influence on our lives. In later life we admire, we are entertained, we may modify some views we already hold, but we are more likely to find in books merely a confirmation of what it is in our minds already; as in a love affair it is our own features that we see reflected flatteringly back. But in childhood all books are books of divination, telling us about the future, and like the fortune teller who sees a long journey in the cards or death by water they influence the future. I suppose that is why books excited us so much. What do we ever get nowadays from reading to equal the excitement and the revelation in those first fourteen years? . . . It is in those early years that I would look for the crisis, the moment when life took a new slant in its journey towards death.

Once the future is foretold, that future becomes a living thing and it will fight very hard to bring itself about.

She drove as though a fortune-teller had warned her about the day.

Before you leave, the fortune-teller reminds you that the future is never set in stone.

You will be fine,” the fortune-teller says. “There may be decisions to make, and surprises in store. Life takes us to unexpected places sometimes. The future is never set in stone, remember that.

Of course you want someone special to love you. A majority of the people who write to me inquire about how they can get the same thing... Unique as every letter is, the point each writer reaches is the same: I want love and I'm afraid I'll never get it. It's hard to answer those letters because I'm an advice columnist, not a fortune-teller. I have words instead of a crystal ball. I can't say when you'll get love or how you'll find it or even promise that you will. I can only say you are worthy of it and that it's never too much to ask for it.

The stranger acted no differently from the fortune-teller who intuits that you have recently suffered a setback; she is unfailingly correct. Witchcraft merely supplied the culprit, sometimes in advance of her crime, often many years later.

Long, long ago, before I was a tormented artist, afflicted with longing yet incapable of forming durable attachments, long before this, I was a glorious ruler uniting all of a divided country—so I was told by the fortune-teller who examined my palm. Great things, she said, are ahead of you, or perhaps behind you; it is difficult to be sure. And yet, she added, what is the difference? Right now you are a child holding hands with a fortune-teller. All the rest is hypothesis and dream.

North Korea is an atheist state. Anyone caught in possession of a Bible faces execution or a life in the gulag. Kim worship is the only permitted outlet for spiritual fervour. Shamans and fortune-tellers, too, are outlawed, but high cadres of the regime consult them. We’d heard that even Kim Jong-il himself sought their advice

THE SON OF THE FORTUNE-TELLER stands in the doorway of a life-size dollhouse filled with larger-than-life-size honeycomb and occupied by bees the size of cats. Bees crawl down the stairs and across the windows and the ceiling, over armchairs and sofas and chandeliers.

Life-ahead is timeless fortune.

Whatever you wish to pay for a glimpse of your future," the fortune-teller says. Bailey stops to consider this for a moment. It is strange, but fair.

Every man has his destiny. But who needs to to go to a fortune-teller to find it? Do I go to a chef to find out if I'm hungry?" Nobu

The distance between an honest Christian mystic and a fortune-teller is sometimes less than half a whisper. Less than a pot of tea or the space between two book covers.

Logic doesn’t work on Wayne.” “I bought a ward against it off a traveling fortune-teller,” Wayne explained. “It lets me add two ’n’ two and get a pickle.

I call myself a fortune teller as I tell you that one day, you’ll hurt me. Then I’ll push you away until you do.

Ah! my poor Bahorel, she is a superb girl, very literary, with tiny feet, little hands, she dresses well, and is white and dimpled, with the eyes of a fortune-teller. I am wild over her.

Are they, though!' said Pancks. 'I shouldn't have thought it.' Not in the least looking at them, but looking at Little Dorrit. 'Perhaps you wonder who I am. Shall I tell you? I am a fortune-teller.

Dreaming, investing, and changing the status quo takes courage; but the courage to melt an ice age does not grow in all cultural climates. Moribund cultures are fertile fields for fearful, fatalistic worldviews. Only astrologers, fortune-tellers, witch doctors, and sorcerers thrive on such glaciers.

Don’t try,” Waxillium said. “Logic doesn’t work on Wayne.” “I bought a ward against it off a traveling fortune-teller,” Wayne explained. “It lets me add two ’n’ two and get a pickle.” “I … have no response to that,” Marasi said.

When the beaded curtain parts with a sound like rain, it is Marco who enters the fortune-teller’s chamber, and Isobel immediately flips her veil from her face, the impossibly thin black silk floating back over her head like mist.

In quelle condizioni era naturale essere depresso, come è naturale che lo sia per chiunque abbia ancora un'idea di quel che la vita potrebbe essere e non è. La depressione diventa un diritto, quando uno si guarda attorno e non vede niente o nessuno che lo ispiri, quando il mondo sembra scivolare via in una gora di ottusità e di grettezza materialista.

Thus the 'fortune-teller' is trying to foresee something that is really quite unforeseeable. This is characteristic of all forms of foreseeing. And precisely because what they 'see' is so vague, it is hard to repudiate fortune-tellers' claims.

Then, if she has fulfilled all the requirements for a sound character and impressive accomplishments, if her parents have agreed to meet all the necessary financial contributions, if the fortune tellers have decided the stars are lucky and the planets are compatible, everyone can laugh with relief and tilt her face up by the chin and say she is exactly what they have been looking for, that she will be a daughter to their household. This, after all, is the boy’s family. They’re entitled to their sense of pride.

The fortune-teller was silent. The girl felt a chill drift over her. Her body broke out in chicken-skin and she huddled lower, trying to get away from that dark touch of fear. The candle flame lashed. Then, as if from a distance, she heard the fortune-teller say: "Nothing." The girl felt a dull, deep pain. That was the seed within her, her fate, and she realized she had known it all along.

In my country, we read the patterns in the grounds of Turkish coffee to predict the future. It’s a very ancient practice. Some people call it tasseography.” She shrugged her shoulders. “To me it’s fortune telling.” Mary had been bustling around a one-burner stove a

Jiminy," says the old woman. The mothballs gleam with excitement and she claps her hands. "A wolf!" "Gram!" Siobhan glares across the room. She turns to me. "You'll have to excuse her. She's real old. Wasn't a lot integrating between the species back in her day." I pad over and put out a paw. "Pleased to meet you, madam." She blushes, the varicose veins in her cheeks swelling with blood. Instead of taking my paw to shake, however, she turns it over as if it's a piece of bruised fruit in a market. "Hmmm..." She pores over my palm, nodding like a fortune-teller. Her spectacles slide comically down the bridge of her nose, and when she looks up at me, her face is full of mock astonishment. "Oh, my! What big teeth you have!" She giggles and kicks her slippered feet. "Gram!! The old elf claps her tiny hands. "I always wanted to say that!

Some people lead charmed lives and think it is all due to them. They stand, like ship captains, proud and tall, feet apart, one hand loosely on the helm of their destinies. They are often charming, charismatic people because why wouldn’t they be? They have no need of fortune tellers. They have only ever faced clear seas and easy choices. When the iceberg looms, when something finally happens that is outside of their control, they are outraged. They whip their eyes to the left, to the right, looking for someone to blame. Try not to marry that sort of person.

They dressed as Mister Crimson or the Lost Bride, or wore the grotesque, goggle-eyed mask of the Madman—all characters from the Komedie Brute. And then there were the Jackals, a group of rowdy men and boys who cavorted through the Barrel in the red lacquered masks of Suli fortune-tellers.

He ran down the heart of the old midway, where the weight guessers, fortune-tellers, and dancing gypsies had once worked. He lowered his chin and held his arms out like a glider, and every few steps he would jump, the way children do, hoping running will turn to flying. It might have seemed ridiculous to anyone watching, this white-haired maintenaance worker, all alone, making like an airplane. But the running boy is inside every man, no matter how old he gets.

This is one aspect of a reporter's job that never ceases to fascinate and disturb me: facts that go unreported do not exist. How many massacres, how many earthquakes happen in the world, how many ships sink, how many volcanoes erupt, and how many people are persecuted, tortured and killed. Yet if no one is there to see, to write, to take a photograph, it is as if these facts had never occurred, this suffering has no importance, no place in history. Because history exists only if someone relates it. Every little description of a thing observed one can leave a seed in the soil of memory - that keeps me tied to my profession.

It is frequently the tragedy of the great artist, as it is of the great scientist, that he frightens the ordinary man. If he is more than a popular story-teller it may take humanity a generation to absorb and grow accustomed to the new geography with which the scientist or artist presents us.... In short, like the herd animals we are, we sniff warily at the strange one among us. If he is fortunate enough finally to be accepted, it is likely to be after a trial of ridicule and after the sting has been removed from his work by long familiarization and bowdlerizing, when the alien quality of his thought has been mitigated or removed.

Actors are liars. Writers, too. The whole lot of them, even the horn players and the fortune-tellers and the freaks and the strongmen. Even the ladies with rings in their noses and high heels on their feet playing violins all along the Pier and the lie they are all singing and dancing and saying is We can get the old world back again.

And if words existed before matter of any kind, before suns and worlds and seas and human beings and fortune-tellers…well, then an alphabet must have existed even earlier, so that words could be formed. Therefore letters are more fundamental and powerful than anything else a diviner could use to force the secrets of the universe into view.

Up to this time, Mr Pancks had transacted little or no business at his quarters in Pentonville, except in the sleeping line; but now that he had become a fortune-teller, he was often closeted after midnight with Mr Rugg in his little front-parlour office, and even after those untimely hours, burnt tallow in his bed-room. Though his duties as his proprietor's grubber were in no wise lessened; and though that service bore no greater resemblance to a bed of roses than was to be discovered in its many thorns; some new branch

Always remember the answers come not from the rock, the teacup, the shell, or the cards. The answers come from you.

Are you a clairvoyant? A fortune-teller? If not, why anticipate the worst for yourself? Past does not equal the future, so why not think big and positive?

Kraus asks the question of Freudian analysis: What would be enough? At what point would talking about one’s problems for x hours a week, be sufficient to bring one to a state of “normalcy”? The genius of Freudianism, Kraus writes, is not the creation of a cure, but of a disease—the universal, if intermittent, human sentiment that “something is not right,” elaborated into a state whose parameters, definitions, and prescriptions are controlled by a self-selecting group of “experts,” who can never be proved wrong. It was said that the genius of the Listerine campaign was attributable to the creation not of mouthwash, but of halitosis. Kraus indicts Freud for the creation of the nondisease of dissatisfaction. (See also the famous “malaise” of Jimmy Carter, which, like Oscar Wilde’s Pea Soup Fogs, didn’t exist ’til someone began describing it.) To consider a general dissatisfaction with one’s life, or with life in general as a political rather than a personal, moral problem, is to exercise or invite manipulation. The fortune teller, the “life coach,” the Spiritual Advisor, these earn their living from applying nonspecific, nonspecifiable “remedies” to nonspecifiable discomforts.The sufferers of such, in medicine, are called “the worried well,” and provide the bulk of income and consume the bulk of time of most physicians. It was the genius of the Obama campaign to exploit them politically. The antecedent of his campaign has been called Roosevelt’s New Deal, but it could, more accurately, be identified as The Music Man.

Istanbul was an illusion. A magician’s trick gone wrong. Istanbul was a dream that existed solely in the minds of hashish eaters. In truth, there was no Istanbul. There were multiple Istanbuls – struggling, competing, clashing, each perceiving that, in the end, only one could survive. There was, for instance, an ancient Istanbul designed to be crossed on foot or by boat – the city of itinerant dervishes, fortune-tellers, matchmakers, seafarers, cotton fluffers, rug beaters and porters with wicker baskets on their backs … There was modern Istanbul – an urban sprawl overrun with cars and motorcycles whizzing back and forth, construction trucks laden with building materials for more shopping centres, skyscrapers, industrial sites … Imperial Istanbul versus plebeian Istanbul; global Istanbul versus parochial Istanbul; cosmopolitan Istanbul versus philistine Istanbul; heretical Istanbul versus pious Istanbul; macho Istanbul versus a feminine Istanbul that adopted Aphrodite – goddess of desire and also of strife – as its symbol and protector … Then there was the Istanbul of those who had left long ago, sailing to faraway ports. For them this city would always be a metropolis made of memories, myths and messianic longings, forever elusive like a lover’s face receding in the mist.

Relieved beyond measure, Sebastian spread his long fingers over the shape of Evie’s thigh. “Riddance,” he managed to mutter, as the door closed behind Hammond. Evie was obviously torn between laughter and tears as she looked down at him. “You stubborn ass,” she said, her eyes wet. “We’ve just managed to drive off one of the most renowned doctors in London. Anyone else we find is going to want to bleed you as well. Who should I send for now? A white witch? A shaman? A Covent Garden fortune-teller?” Using the last of his strength, Sebastian managed to drag her hand up to his mouth. “You,” he whispered, holding her fingers to his lips. “Just you.

Great things, she said, are ahead of you, or perhaps behind you; it is difficult to be sure. And yet, she added, what is the difference? Right now you are a child holding hands with a fortune-teller. All the rest is hypothesis and dream.

I know all their favorites. It's a knack, a professional secret, like a fortune teller reading palms. My mother would have laughed at this waste of my skills, but I have no desire to probe farther into their lives than this. I do not want their secrets or their innermost thoughts. Nor do I want their fears or gratitude. A tame alchemist, she would have called me with kindly contempt, working domestic magic when I could have wielded marvels. But I like these people. I like their small and introverted concerns. I can read their eyes, their mouths, so easily- this one with its hint of bitterness will relish my zesty orange twists; this sweet-smiling one the soft-centered apricot hearts; this girl with the windblown hair will love the mendiants; this brisk, cheery woman the chocolate brazils. For Guillaume, the florentines, eaten neatly over a saucer in his tidy bachelor's house. Narcisse's appetite for double-chocolate truffles reveals the gentle heart beneath the gruff exterior. Caroline Clairmont will dream of cinder toffee tonight and wake hungry and irritable. And the children... Chocolate curls, white buttons with colored vermicelli, pain d'épices with gilded edging, marzipan fruits in their nests of ruffled paper, peanut brittle, clusters, cracknells, assorted misshapes in half-kilo boxes... I sell dreams, small comforts, sweet harmless temptations to bring down a multitude of saints crash-crash-crashing among the hazels and nougatines....

One of the first shrinks I went to after Cass died told me that the brain has a hardwired need to find correlations, to make sense of nonsensical data by making connections between unrelated things. Humans have evolved a universal tendency to seek patterns in random information, hence the existence of fortune-tellers and dream interpreters and people who see the face of Jesus in a piece of toast. But the cold, hard truth is that there are no connections between anything. Life—all of existence—is totally random. Your lucky lottery numbers aren’t really lucky, because there’s no such thing as luck. The black cat that crosses your path isn’t a bad omen, it’s just a cat out for a walk. An eclipse doesn’t mean that the gods are angry, just as a bus narrowly missing you as you cross the street doesn’t mean there’s a guardian angel looking out for you. There are no gods. There are no angels. Superstitions aren’t real, and no amount of wishing, praying, or rationalizing can change the fact that life is just one long sequence of random events that ultimately have no meaning. I really hated that shrink.

Later, when his desires had been satisfied, he slept in an odorous whorehouse, snoring lustily next to an insomniac tart, and dreamed. He could dream in seven languages: Italian, Spanic, Arabic, Persian, Russian, English and Portughese. He had picked up languages the way most sailors picked up diseases; languages were his gonorrhea, his syphilis, his scurvy, his ague,his plague. As soon as he fell asleep half the world started babbling in his brain, telling wondrous travelers' tales. In this half-discovered world every day brought news of fresh enchantments. The visionary, revelatory dream-poetry of the quotidian had not yet been crushed by blinkered, prosy fact. Himself a teller of tales, he had been driven out of his door by stories of wonder, and by one in particular, a story which could make his fortune or else cost him his life.

Fortune-teller tea. Give it a sip!" The liquid was pink and smelled of strawberries, but when Maddie drank it, the flavor was deep and a little bitter, followed by a sudden burst of sweetness. Her father returned. "Well?" he asked. "It started out as black licorice and then melted into butterscotch," she said. "Oh, my girl, the tea is telling you that this is the year to keep your ear to the ground and listen for surprises. Change is coming!" Maddie's stomach was full of thoughts and her head full of butterflies. She checked her watch again. She couldn't wait for it all to begin.

Research by media scholars Daniel Kreiss and Philip Howard indicates that the 2008 Obama campaign compiled significant data on more than 250 million Americans, including “a vast array of online behavioral and relational data collected from use of the campaign’s web site and third-party social media sites such as Facebook.…”96 Journalist Sasha Issenberg, who documented these developments in his book The Victory Lab, quotes one of Obama’s 2008 political consultants who likened predictive modeling to the tools of a fortune-teller: “We knew who… people were going to vote for before they decided.

Life is full of opportunities. The problem is to recognize them when they present themselves, and that isn't always easy. Mine, for instance, had all the marks of a curse: 'Beware! You run a grave risk of dying in 1993. You mustn't fly that year. Don't fly, not even once,' a fortune-teller told me.

Churchill, aware of Hitler’s use of astrologers, once summoned one himself. In a what-the-hell moment, he asked the surprised fortune-teller to tell him what Hitler’s fortune-teller was telling Hitler. Churchill told his friend Kay Halle the story years later with the caveat that “this is just between us.

I always prefer to work in the studio. It isolates people from their environment. They become in a sense...symbolic of themselves. I often feel that people come to me to be photographed as they would go to a doctor or a fortune teller-to find out how they are. So they are dependent on me. I have to engage them. Otherwise there is nothing to photograph. The concentration has to come from me and involve them. Sometimes the force of it grows so strong that sounds in the studio go unheard. Time stops. We share a brief, intense intimacy. But is is unearned. It has no past...no future. And when the sitting is over-when the picture is done-there is nothing left except the photograph...the photograph and a kind of embarrassment. They leave...and I don't know them. I have hardly heard what they have said. If I meet them a week later in a room somewhere, I expect they won't recognize me. Because I don't feel I was really there. At least the part of me that was...is now in the photograph. And the photographs have a reality for me that the people don't. it is through the photographs that I know them. Maybe it is in the nature of being a photographer. I am never really implicated. I don't have to have any real knowledge. It is all a question of recognitions.

We played checkers," said Czernobog, hacking himself another lump of pot roast. "The young man and me. He won a game, I won a game. Because he won a game, I have agreed to go with him and Wednesday, and help in their madness. And because I won a game, when this is all done, I get to kill the young man, with a blow of a hammer." The two Zoryas nodded gravely. "Such a pity," Zorya Vechernyaya told Shadow. "In my fortune for you, I should have said you would have a long life and a happy one, with many children." "That is why you are a good fortune-teller, said Zorya Utrennyaya. She looked sleepy, as if it were effort for her to be up so late. "You tell the best lies.

This was why love was so dangerous. Love turned the world into a garden, so beguiling it was easy to forget that rose petals sails appeared charmed. They blazed red in the day and silver at night, like a magician’s cloak, hinting at mysteries concealed beneath, which Tella planned to uncover that night. Drunken laughter floated above her as Tella delved deeper into the ship’s underbelly in search of Nigel the Fortune-teller. Her first evening on the vessel she’d made the mistake of sleeping, not realizing until the following day that Legend’s performers had switched their waking hours to prepare for the next Caraval. They slumbered in the day and woke after sunset. All Tella had learned her first day aboard La Esmeralda was that Nigel was on the ship, but she had yet to actually see him. The creaking halls beneath decks were like the bridges of Caraval, leading different places at different hours and making it difficult to know who stayed in which room. Tella wondered if Legend had designed it that way, or if it was just the unpredictable nature of magic. She imagined Legend in his top hat, laughing at the question and at the idea that magic had more control than he did. For many, Legend was the definition of magic. When she had first arrived on Isla de los Sueños, Tella suspected everyone could be Legend. Julian had so many secrets that she’d questioned if Legend’s identity was one of them, up until he’d briefly died. Caspar, with his sparkling eyes and rich laugh, had played the role of Legend in the last game, and at times he’d been so convincing Tella wondered if he was actually acting. At first sight, Dante, who was almost too beautiful to be real, looked like the Legend she’d always imagined. Tella could picture Dante’s wide shoulders filling out a black tailcoat while a velvet top hat shadowed his head. But the more Tella thought about Legend, the more she wondered if he even ever wore a top hat. If maybe the symbol was another thing to throw people off. Perhaps Legend was more magic than man and Tella had never met him in the flesh at all. The boat rocked and an actual laugh pierced the quiet. Tella froze. The laughter ceased but the air in the thin corridor shifted. What had smelled of salt and wood and damp turned thick and velvet-sweet. The scent of roses. Tella’s skin prickled; gooseflesh rose on her bare arms. At her feet a puddle of petals formed a seductive trail of red. Tella might not have known Legend’s true name, but she knew he favored red and roses and games. Was this his way of toying with her? Did he know what she was up to? The bumps on her arms crawled up to her neck and into her scalp as her newest pair of slippers crushed the tender petals. If Legend knew what she was after, Tella couldn’t imagine he would guide her in the correct direction, and yet the trail of petals was too tempting to avoid. They led to a door that glowed copper around the edges. She turned the knob. And her world transformed into a garden, a paradise made of blossoming flowers and bewitching romance. The walls were formed of moonlight. The ceiling was made of roses that dripped down toward the table in the center of the room, covered with plates of cakes and candlelight and sparkling honey wine. But none of it was for Tella. It was all for Scarlett. Tella had stumbled into her sister’s love story and it was so romantic it was painful to watch. Scarlett stood across the chamber. Her full ruby gown bloomed brighter than any flowers, and her glowing skin rivaled the moon as she gazed up at Julian. They touched nothing except each other. While Scarlett pressed her lips to Julian’s, his arms wrapped around her as if he’d found the one thing he never wanted to let go of. This was why love was so dangerous. Love turned the world into a garden, so beguiling it was easy to forget that rose petals were as ephemeral as feelings, eventually they would wilt and die, leaving nothing but the thorns.

Envoi You will die on a boat from Yalta to Odessa. —a fortune teller, 1992 What ties me to this earth? In Massachusetts, the birds force themselves into my lines— the sea repeats itself, repeats, repeats. I bless the boat from Yalta to Odessa and bless each passenger, his bones, his genitals, bless the sky inside his body, the sky my medicine, the sky my country. I bless the continent of gulls, the argument of their order. The wind, my master insists on the joy of poplars, swallows,— bless one woman’s brows, her lips and their salt, bless the roundness of her shoulder. Her face, a lantern by which I live my life. You can find us, Lord, she is a woman dancing with her eyes closed and I am a man arguing with this woman

A fortune teller told me if I can predict your future, You give me some small change, to which I replied why, he said, for my knowledge about Your life, I did not need that, he replied as I yours Father's and Mother can call by name than You give me money, which I answered as you come to me as a soothsayer and do not know whether I will or do not pay then You walk down on the wrong path for Your future, and are You a cheater. So please stop to tell stories about others when You not even know them in person or about their past for sure. A story from another is many time not based on the true, so let that story rest before till You know its a honest one, and not let lead it a way so it damage somebody's private life. This is not pointed to a person, but general in life. keep smiling and a good day Jan Jansen

Grey was here.” He hadn’t known, that was obvious from the way his eyes widened. “You lie.” Rose chuckled. “I saw him. I spoke to him. He said he came to see me. And then he ran out of here as though the hounds of hell were nipping at his heels.” Archer shook his head, an expression of disbelief on his face. “They tend to do that when Hades freezes over.” Then he offered her a grin. “He braved being seen in public just to come here and see you?” “He was watching from a balcony. I wouldn’t have known he was here if the fortune teller hadn’t told me.” His brows shot up. “And there’s a story for another time. Look, Lady Rose, I know he’s frustrating as all get-out, but you cannot expect Grey to change years of behavior in a week. You have to be patient-like waves lapping at a stone.” That was so very easily said. He wasn’t the one being pressured to find a husband. He wasn’t the one who felt as though everything she wanted was just out of reach. “You know, I suddenly find myself very interested in Lady Monteforte’s literary tastes. Shall I make the introductions?” “I will hang your puppy if you do not.” Rose grinned. He truly was the most charming of rascals. “How very fortunate for me then, that I do not own a puppy.” “For shame. Every young lady should have a puppy.” Rose made the introductions, and Archer wasted no time in asking Lady Monteforte if she cared to dance. For a moment it seemed the lady might decline, but then Rose offered to stay with Jacqueline and Archer offered the widow his arm. She hesitated before taking it. Interesting. Rose had never seen a woman react so coolly to Archer’s charm before. The Kane men were obviously losing their touch.

It is for this reason that art, true art, the one that comes from the soul, is so important in our lives. Art consoles us, it lifts us and directs us. Art cures us. We are not only that which we eat and the air that we breathe. We are also the stories we have heard, the tales we fell asleep listening to when we were children, the books we have read, the music we heard and the emotions that a painting, a statue, or a poem have given us.

There was just enough room for the tonga to get through among the bullock-carts, rickshaws, cycles and pedestrians who thronged both the road and the pavement--which they shared with barbers plying their trade out of doors, fortune-tellers, flimsy tea-stalls, vegetable-stands, monkey-trainers, ear-cleaners, pickpockets, stray cattle, the odd sleepy policeman sauntering along in faded khaki, sweat-soaked men carrying impossible loads of copper, steel rods, glass or scrap paper on their backs as they yelled 'Look out! Look out!' in voices that somehow pierced though the din, shops of brassware and cloth (the owners attempting with shouts and gestures to entice uncertain shoppers in), the small carved stone entrance of the Tinny Tots (English Medium) School which opened out onto the courtyard of the reconverted haveli of a bankrupt aristocrat, and beggars--young and old, aggressive and meek, leprous, maimed or blinded--who would quietly invade Nabiganj as evening fell, attempting to avoid the police as they worked the queues in front of the cinema-halls. Crows cawed, small boys in rags rushed around on errands (one balancing six small dirty glasses of tea on a cheap tin tray as he weaved through the crowd) monkeys chattered in and bounded about a great shivering-leafed pipal tree and tried to raid unwary customers as they left the well-guarded fruit-stand, women shuffled along in anonymous burqas or bright saris, with or without their menfolk, a few students from the university lounging around a chaat-stand shouted at each other from a foot away either out of habit or in order to be heard, mangy dogs snapped and were kicked, skeletal cats mewed and were stoned, and flies settled everywhere: on heaps of foetid, rotting rubbish, on the uncovered sweets at the sweetseller's in whose huge curved pans of ghee sizzled delicioius jalebis, on the faces of the sari-clad but not the burqa-clad women, and on the horse's nostrils as he shook his blinkered head and tried to forge his way through Old Brahmpur in the direction of the Barsaat Mahal.

If you didn’t find some way of stopping it, people would go on asking questions. The teachers were useful there. Bands of them wandered through the mountains, along with the tinkers, portable blacksmiths, miracle medicine men, cloth peddlers, fortune-tellers, and all the other travelers who sold things the people didn’t need every day but occasionally found useful. They went from village to village delivering short lessons on many subjects. They kept apart from the other travelers and were quite mysterious in their ragged robes and strange square hats. They used long words, like corrugated iron. They lived rough lives, surviving on what food they could earn from giving lessons to anyone who would listen. When no one would listen, they lived on baked hedgehog. They went to sleep under the stars, which the math teachers would count, the astronomy teachers would measure, and the literature teachers would name. The geography teachers got lost in the woodsand fell into bear traps. People were usually quite pleased to see them. They taught children enough to shut them up, which was the main thing, after all. But they always had to be driven out of the villages by nightfall in case they stole chickens.

I see a man.” Rose bit back a sigh. Of course she did. She seemed to see a man in every cup. And here she’d actually hoped that Sadie Moon might be as unusually talented as her appearance suggested. “He hides himself. A mask. He keeps to the shadows.” Rose’s heart rolled over her chest. “What else?” “You want him,” Sadie said, turning the cup in her palms. “You do not understand what you feel for him, or why he pushes you away.” “No.” Rose was breathless. “I don’t.” Those fey eyes locked with hers. “Because he loves you enough to give you up. He is all about duty and honor, but he is ruled by fear.” She was on the very edge of her seat now. “Yes. He’s afraid of coming out of the shadows.” Sadie shook her head, the feathers on her hat bobbing. “That’s only part of it. He’s afraid for you.” “For me?” Rose’s teeth clicked together. “Why?” The fortune teller shrugged. “For that answer, you will have to go to him. You have many men in your cup, Lady Rose.” Disappointed, Rose sagged a little. “For all the good it does me.” A bright grin flashed beneath that amazing hat. “The man who wants you but will not take you. Another who would take everything you offer and give what he can of himself-but it will not be enough. Another who wants nothing from you at all.” Grey. Kellan? And probably Archer.

What did you think? How do you feel?—Is she a real fortune-teller?” demanded the Misses Eshton. “Now, now, good people,” returned Miss Ingram, “don’t press upon me. Really your organs of wonder and credulity are easily excited: you seem, by the importance of you all—my good mama included—ascribe to this matter, absolutely to believe we have a genuine witch in the house, who is in close alliance with the old gentleman. I have seen a gipsy vagabond; she has practised in hackneyed fashion the science of palmistry and told me what such people usually tell. My whim is gratified; and now I think Mr. Eshton will do well to put the hag in the stocks to-morrow morning, as he threatened.