Horoscopes Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Horoscopes. Here they are! All 200 of them:

I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance
Carl Sagan (The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark)
It’s the way he had a cup of tea waiting for me when I woke up. It’s the way he turned on his laptop especially for me to look up all my Internet horoscopes and helped me choose the best one. He knows all the crappy, embarrassing bits about me that I normally try to hide from any man for as long as possible… and he loves me anyway.
Sophie Kinsella (Can You Keep a Secret?)
HOROSCOPE: Today is a good time for making new friends. A good deed may have unforeseen consequences. Don’t upset any druids. You will soon be going on a very strange journey. Your lucky food is small cucumbers. People pointing knives at you are probably up to no good. PS, we really mean it about the druids.
Terry Pratchett
I thank everyone I don't love. They don't cause me heartache they don't make me write long letters they don't disturb my dreams I don't await them anxiously I don't read their horoscopes in magazines I don't dial their numbers I don't think of them. I thank them a lot they don't turn my life upside down.
Dunya Mikhail (The War Works Hard)
The good stars met in your horoscope, Made you of spirit and fire and dew.
Robert Browning
You are always born under the wrong sign, and to live in this world properly you have to rewrite your own horoscope day by day.
Umberto Eco (Foucault’s Pendulum)
Don't go there Rule" Lawe warned him softly. " I don't think your horoscope declared today to be a good day to die.
Lora Leigh (Lawe's Justice (Breeds, #18))
The only chains God wants us to wear are the chains of righteousness--not the chains of hopeless subjectivism, not the shackles of risk-free living, not the fetters of horoscope decision making--just the chains befitting a bond servant of Christ Jesus. Die to self. Live for Christ. And then do what you want, and go where you want, for God's glory.
Kevin DeYoung (Just Do Something: A Liberating Approach to Finding God's Will)
Perfect! You guys are the same age. I bet you have a lot in common.” Classic adult logic. Reid and I are vaguely the same age, so of course we’re basically soul mates. It’s like horoscopes. Somehow I’m supposed to believe that I’m similar in some meaningful way to every single person born on my birthday. Or every single Sagittarius. I mean, I barely have anything in common with Cassie, and we were born six minutes apart.
Becky Albertalli (The Upside of Unrequited (Simonverse, #2))
Even if it were possible to cast my horoscope in this one life, and to make an accurate prediction about my future, it would not be possible to 'show' it to me because as soon as I saw it my future would change by definition. This is why Werner Heisenberg's adaptation of the Hays Office—the so-called principle of uncertainty whereby the act of measuring something has the effect of altering the measurement—is of such importance. In my case the difference is often made by publicity. For example, and to boast of one of my few virtues, I used to derive pleasure from giving my time to bright young people who showed promise as writers and who asked for my help. Then some profile of me quoted someone who disclosed that I liked to do this. Then it became something widely said of me, whereupon it became almost impossible for me to go on doing it, because I started to receive far more requests than I could respond to, let alone satisfy. Perception modifies reality: when I abandoned the smoking habit of more than three decades I was given a supposedly helpful pill called Wellbutrin. But as soon as I discovered that this was the brand name for an antidepressant, I tossed the bottle away. There may be successful methods for overcoming the blues but for me they cannot include a capsule that says: 'Fool yourself into happiness, while pretending not to do so.' I should actually want my mind to be strong enough to circumvent such a trick.
Christopher Hitchens (Hitch 22: A Memoir)
We love men because they can never fake orgasms, even if they wanted to. Because they write poems, songs, and books in our honor. Because they never understand us, but they never give up. Because they can see beauty in women when women have long ceased to see any beauty in themselves. Because they come from little boys. Because they can churn out long, intricate, Machiavellian, or incredibly complex mathematics and physics equations, but they can be comparably clueless when it comes to women. Because they are incredible lovers and never rest until we’re happy. Because they elevate sports to religion. Because they’re never afraid of the dark. Because they don’t care how they look or if they age. Because they persevere in making and repairing things beyond their abilities, with the naïve self-assurance of the teenage boy who knew everything. Because they never wear or dream of wearing high heels. Because they’re always ready for sex. Because they’re like pomegranates: lots of inedible parts, but the juicy seeds are incredibly tasty and succulent and usually exceed your expectations. Because they’re afraid to go bald. Because you always know what they think and they always mean what they say. Because they love machines, tools, and implements with the same ferocity women love jewelry. Because they go to great lengths to hide, unsuccessfully, that they are frail and human. Because they either speak too much or not at all to that end. Because they always finish the food on their plate. Because they are brave in front of insects and mice. Because a well-spoken four-year old girl can reduce them to silence, and a beautiful 25-year old can reduce them to slobbering idiots. Because they want to be either omnivorous or ascetic, warriors or lovers, artists or generals, but nothing in-between. Because for them there’s no such thing as too much adrenaline. Because when all is said and done, they can’t live without us, no matter how hard they try. Because they’re truly as simple as they claim to be. Because they love extremes and when they go to extremes, we’re there to catch them. Because they are tender they when they cry, and how seldom they do it. Because what they lack in talk, they tend to make up for in action. Because they make excellent companions when driving through rough neighborhoods or walking past dark alleys. Because they really love their moms, and they remind us of our dads. Because they never care what their horoscope, their mother-in-law, nor the neighbors say. Because they don’t lie about their age, their weight, or their clothing size. Because they have an uncanny ability to look deeply into our eyes and connect with our heart, even when we don’t want them to. Because when we say “I love you” they ask for an explanation.
Paulo Coelho
At its best fashion is a game. But for women it's a compulsory game, like net ball, and you can't get out of it by faking your period. I know I have tried. And so for a woman every outfit is a hopeful spell, cast to influence the outcome of the day. An act of trying to predict your fate, like looking at your horoscope. No wonder there are so many fashion magazines. No wonder the fashion industry is worth an estimated 900 billion dollars a year. No wonder every woman's first thought is, for nearly every event in her life, be it work, snow or birth. The semi-despairing cry of "but what will I wear?" Because when a woman says I have nothing to wear, what she really means is there is nothing here for who I am supposed to be today.
Caitlin Moran (How to Be a Woman)
I'm underrealized," Lula said. "I gotta lot of untapped potential. Yesterday my horoscope said I gotta expand my horizons." "You expand any more in that dress, and you'll get yourself arrested," Connie said. -- Twelve Sharp
Janet Evanovich (Twelve Sharp (Stephanie Plum, #12))
It's true," Eliot said. "Statistically, historically, and however else you want to look at it, you are almost never right. A monkey making life decisions based on its horoscope in USA Today would be right more often than you. But in this case, yes, you were right. Don't spoil it.
Lev Grossman (The Magician King (The Magicians, #2))
You possess a unique, innate ability to see most aspects of most situations all at once!
Rosemary Breen
the world you are forced to inhabit does not match up to the world
Rosemary Breen (Pisces: Horoscope Compatibility)
There is another side to the Pisces nature and that is the brutal honesty that can catch others off guard.
Rosemary Breen (Pisces: Horoscope Compatibility)
On the one hand, you have a wonderfully caring, magnetic personality that draw people in close. On the other hand, you come across as standoffish, even reclusive. While both personalities are, in fact, who you are, at any one moment which side you show to the world depends on who you are with and the circumstances you are in.
Rosemary Breen
Chances are, while you can come across as introverted, the real reason for your apparent reserve is you’re happy to be the life of your own party (be it in your head or in your own space) rather than follow the crowd.
Rosemary Breen (Pisces: Horoscope Compatibility)
..reading your ex's horoscope every week isn't going to help you control his life. No, you need to hide in his bushes, break into his email, or kidnap his dog if you want to effect any real change.
Jenny Mollen (I Like You Just the Way I Am: Stories About Me and Some Other People)
While a Sagittarian tends to be candid, there’s also a part of them that could be described as being more devious than Pisces, more deceptive than Gemini and more carnal than Scorpio.
Rosemary Breen (Horoscope Compatibility for All the Zodiac Signs)
Come to that, don't pay out good money for horoscopes. If things are going to go badly for you, is that what you need to know as you saddle up?
Hilary Mantel (Bring Up the Bodies (Thomas Cromwell, #2))
The total number of people who understand relativistic time, even after eighty years since the advent of special relativity, is still much smaller than the number of people who believe in horoscopes.
Yuval Ne'eman
...his horoscope had been pretty misleading as well. It had mentioned an unusual amount of planetary activity in his sign and had urged him to differentiate between what he thought he wanted and what he actually needed, and suggested that he should tackle emotional or work problems with determination and complete honesty, but had inexplicably failed to mention that he would be dead before the day was out.
Douglas Adams (Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (Dirk Gently, #1))
What if the preacher or father’s saying ‘Someone here’s lost and hopeless’ was tantamount to those Sun-Times horoscopes that are specially designed to be so universally obvious that they always give their horoscope readers that special eerie feeling of particularity and insight, exploiting the psychological fact that most people are narcissistic and prone to the illusion that they and their problems are uniquely special and that if they’re feeling a certain way then surely they’re the only person who is feeling like that.
David Foster Wallace (The Pale King)
Astrology is the study of man’s response to planetary stimuli. The stars have no conscious benevolence or animosity; they merely send forth positive and negative radiations. Of themselves, these do not help or harm humanity, but offer a lawful channel for the outward operation of cause-effect equilibriums which each man has set into motion in the past. “A child is born on that day and at that hour when the celestial rays are in mathematical harmony with his individual karma. His horoscope is a challenging portrait, revealing his unalterable past and its probable future results. But the natal chart can be rightly interpreted only by men of intuitive wisdom: these are few.
Paramahansa Yogananda (The Autobiography of a Yogi ("Popular Life Stories"))
Tuesday Horoscope: Your happily ever after begins today, as long as you remember there is no such thing as happily ever after.
Penny Reid (Love Hacked (Knitting in the City, #3))
Strange, her horoscope hadn't mentioned to beware of crazy kidnappers or demented desert sheikhs this week.
Lora Leigh (Dangerous Pleasure (Bound Hearts, #12))
How long before we devise a means of telling horoscopes with gas lamps?
K.J. Bishop (The Etched City)
Men are like horoscopes,” Trixie cut Skye off. “They always tell you what to do and are usually wrong.
Denise Swanson (Murder of a Royal Pain (A Scumble River Mystery, #11))
In the 18th century, a revolution in thought, known as the Enlightenment, dragged us away from the superstition and brutality of the Middle Ages toward a modern age of science, reason and democracy. It changed everything. If it wasn't for the Enlightenment, you wouldn't be reading this right now. You'd be standing in a smock throwing turnips at a witch. Yes, the Enlightenment was one of the most significant developments since the wheel. Which is why we're trying to bollocks it all up. Welcome to a dangerous new era - the Unlightenment - in which centuries of rational thought are overturned by idiots. Superstitious idiots. They're everywhere - reading horoscopes, buying homeopathic remedies, consulting psychics, babbling about "chakras" and "healing energies", praying to imaginary gods, and rejecting science in favour of soft-headed bunkum. But instead of slapping these people round the face till they behave like adults, we encourage them. We've got to respect their beliefs, apparently.
Charlie Brooker
He’d heard of this woman. The Dame de Doubtance, they called her: a madwoman and a caster of horoscopes. Gaultier gave her house-room and men and women came to her from all the known world and had their futures foretold—if she felt like it. She had given some help once to Lymond, on her own severe terms, because of a distant link, it was said, with his family. Plainly, a crazy old harridan. But if she was going to tell Lymond he ought to find a nice girl and marry her, Jerott wanted very much to be there.
Dorothy Dunnett (Pawn in Frankincense (The Lymond Chronicles, #4))
At breakfast, Babette read all our horoscopes aloud, using her storytelling voice. I tried not to listen when she got to mine, although I think I wanted to listen, I think I sought some clues.
Don DeLillo (White Noise)
A scientist places an ad in a Paris newspaper offering a free horoscope. He receives about 150 replies, each, as requested, detailing a place and time of birth. Every respondent is then sent the identical horoscope, along with a questionnaire asking how accurate the horoscope had been. Ninety-four per cent of the respondents (and 90 per cent of their families and friends) reply that they were at least recognizable in the horoscope. However, the horoscope was drawn up for a French serial killer. If an astrologer can get this far without even meeting his subjects, think how well someone sensitive to human nuances and not overly scrupulous might do.
Carl Sagan (The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark)
I have often been asked whether one should believe in something like numerology, or feng shui, or horoscopes and almanacs. The truth is that NONE of these matter when you are trying to create your own reality. The spiritual masters have told us, time and time again, that the power is WITHIN us. It is not in something that is outside of us. Even positive psychology says this: That when we ascribe power to something that is outside of us (such as what an ancient book says, or what an ancient calendar says), then in essence we are “giving our power away”.
Richard Dotts (Banned Manifestation Secrets (Banned Secrets Book 2))
He asks Alicia if she wants to go to a movie, but she says that her horoscope told her she needs to concentrate on her work. “So you don’t want to let money be a tyrant in your life, but it’s fine if astrology is?
Beth Morgan (A Touch of Jen)
I don't believe that Nature's powers Have tied her hands or pinioned ours, By marking on the heavenly vault Our fate without mistake or fault. That fate depends on conjunctions Of places, persons, times, and tracks, And not on the functions Of more or less of quacks.
Jean de la Fontaine (Fables)
Put it this way, how do you feel about the supernatural?” “I’m fine with it,” Molly replied coolly. “I used to watch Charmed and Buffy and all those shows.” Gabriel winced slightly. “This isn’t quite the same thing.” “Okay, well, listen to this. Last week my horoscope in Cosmo told me I was going to meet an enchanting stranger and this guy on the bus gave me his phone number. I’m a total believer now.” “Yeah, you’ve really seen the light,” Xavier said under his breath. “Did you know that Sagittarians have a problem with sarcasm?” Molly snapped. “That would be very enlightening, except I’m a Leo.” “Yeah, well, everyone knows they’re a pack of assholes!” “My God, you’re like talking to a rock.” “You’re a rock!
Alexandra Adornetto (Hades (Halo, #2))
In all probability, the man who found the horoscope would also catch Nut and Nutcracker. They had to believe all the more strongly in the astrologer’s new forecast since none of his predictions had ever come true. Sooner or later, his prognoses had to be right, given that the king, who could never be wrong, had made him his Grand Augur.
E.T.A. Hoffmann (Nutcracker and Mouse King and The Tale of the Nutcracker)
You are fortunate to be an Aquarius because you are known as the humanitarian zodiac sign. You are progressive in your thinking, which is reflected in every aspect of your life. You do not like being told how to live your life, and you will make your decisions clear to anyone who dares question them. You are energetic, with a zest for life. Unfortunately, society’s boundaries can still be insurmountable, even for an Aquarian such as yourself. You are very much in charge of your own destiny and, if something or someone gets in the way of your aspirations, you won’t give up on your goals easily. This perseverance earns you respect from others, even if they disagree with what you are hoping to accomplish.
Rosemary Breen (Horoscope Compatibility for All the Zodiac Signs)
The Moon rules our emotional nature, how we react in situations, and what is needed in our lives to make us feel emotionally safe and secure.
Rosemary Breen (Horoscope Compatibility for All the Zodiac Signs)
Jung: we only discover what supports us when everything else we thought supported us doesn’t support us anymore.
Howard Sasportas (The Twelve Houses: Exploring the Houses of the Horoscope)
I write weird stories. I don't know why I like weirdness so much. Myself, I'm a very realistic person. I don't trust anything New Age -- or reincarnation, dreams, Tarot, horoscopes. I don't trust anything like that at all. I wake up at 6 in the morning and go to bed at 10, jogging every day and swimming, eating healthy food. I'm very realistic. But when I write, I write weird. That's very strange. When I'm getting more and more serious, I'm getting more and more weird. When I want to write about the reality of society and the world, it gets weird. Many people ask me why, and I can't answer that. But I recognized when I was interviewing those 63 ordinary people -- they were very straightforward, very simple, very ordinary, but their stories were sometimes very weird. That was interesting.
Haruki Murakami
If you don't believe that horoscopes are true, then you're usually of the opinion that the writer has chosen some vague universal truths about people so anyone who reads it will be able to relate in some respect, and I quite like that every human being has these vague truths in common. We all doubt ourselves sometimes, we all experience change, and we all have people who mean a lot to us who we don't see enough. Horoscopes, even if we believe them to be lies, prove that we're all connected and I like that.
James Acaster (Perfect Sound Whatever)
Foolish people spend time and money poring over horoscopes and consulting so-called psychics trying to see the dark unknown. How much better to walk through life holding the hand of One who knows the way and cares for us!
Adrian Rogers (Unveiling the End Times in Our Time: The Triumph of the Lamb in Revelation)
We find time for entertainment: we throw dice or flip throw our papers for news of yesterday’s wounded, and read the horoscope column: In the year two thousand and two the camera smiles for those born in the sign of siege
Mahmoud Darwish (أثر الفراشة)
You can change what is written in your horoscope. By acting at your lowest good, you can turn an otherwise very good horoscope into a very challenging life. But by acting by your highest good you can definitely transform an astrological lemon of a chart into terrestrial lemonade. The sugar is consciousness.
Alan Oken
Vera Wong Zhuzhu, age sixty, is a pig, but she really should have been born a rooster. We are, of course, referring to Chinese horoscopes. Vera Wong is a human woman, thank you very much, but roosters have nothing on her. Every morning
Jesse Q. Sutanto (Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers (Vera Wong, #1))
Successful long term relationships are all about power levels. A high power level male will attract and succeed with a high level power female. How do we define those power levels? We can’t, they are inherently in us, and invisible to scientists, accountants, psychologists and spiritualists alike. None can explain the Universe in its entirety, and it is more than chemistry, biology, physics, genetics, horoscopes, religion, in-laws, fame, psychology and spirituality. We may be infatuated by a person, but as soon as we hold their hands, kiss their lips, and especially, make love or have sex with them, their power levels will be instantly exposed.
Robert Black
To communicate with Mars, converse with spirits, To report the behaviour of the sea monster, Describe the horoscope, haruspicate or scry, Observe disease in signatures, evoke Biography from the wrinkles of the palm And tragedy from fingers; release omens By sortilege, or tea leaves, riddle the inevitable With playing cards, fiddle with pentagrams Or barbituric acids, or dissect The recurrent image into pre-conscious terrors— To explore the womb, or tomb, or dreams; all these are usual Pastimes and drugs, and features of the press: And always will be, some of them especially When there is distress of nations and perplexity Whether on the shores of Asia, or in the Edgware Road. Men's curiosity searches past and future And clings to that dimension. ...
T.S. Eliot
The Sun rules our inner personalities - who we are to those who know us best.
Rosemary Breen (Horoscope Compatibility for All the Zodiac Signs)
He was forever deciphering the huge horoscope of Life, yet getting no further than the House of Wonder, on whose cusp surely he had been born.
Algernon Blackwood (The Centaur)
But fate was a myth constructed by fools—people who gamble or follow horoscopes, who believe the stars rule their lives.
Meg Gardiner (UNSUB (UNSUB, #1))
Doubtless any horoscope seems "true" if it tells that you are highly attractive to the opposite sex and your worst fault is generosity.
George Orwell (Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays)
No horoscope matches this accuracy. No theory of human causality, Freudian, Marxist, Christian or animist, has ever been so precise. No prophet in the Old Testament, no entrail-grazing oracle in ancient Greece, no crystal-ball gypsy clairvoyant on the pier at Bognor Regis ever pretended to tell people exactly when their lives would fall apart, let alone got it right.
Matt Ridley (Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters)
Our personal natal horoscope provides us with a powerful tool for understanding our own energy signature and how it [one person, or, a group] is affected by other energy forms including matter.
Robert Allen Bartlett (Real Alchemy: A Primer of Practical Alchemy)
Attempts to locate oneself within history are as natural, and as absurd, as attempts to locate oneself within astronomy. On the day that I was born, 13 April 1949, nineteen senior Nazi officials were convicted at Nuremberg, including Hitler's former envoy to the Vatican, Baron Ernst von Weizsacker, who was found guilty of planning aggression against Czechoslovakia and committing atrocities against the Jewish people. On the same day, the State of Israel celebrated its first Passover seder and the United Nations, still meeting in those days at Flushing Meadow in Queens, voted to consider the Jewish state's application for membership. In Damascus, eleven newspapers were closed by the regime of General Hosni Zayim. In America, the National Committee on Alcoholism announced an upcoming 'A-Day' under the non-uplifting slogan: 'You can drink—help the alcoholic who can't.' ('Can't'?) The International Court of Justice at The Hague ruled in favor of Britain in the Corfu Channel dispute with Albania. At the UN, Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko denounced the newly formed NATO alliance as a tool for aggression against the USSR. The rising Chinese Communists, under a man then known to Western readership as Mao Tze-Tung, announced a limited willingness to bargain with the still-existing Chinese government in a city then known to the outside world as 'Peiping.' All this was unknown to me as I nuzzled my mother's breast for the first time, and would certainly have happened in just the same way if I had not been born at all, or even conceived. One of the newspaper astrologists for that day addressed those whose birthday it was: There are powerful rays from the planet Mars, the war god, in your horoscope for your coming year, and this always means a chance to battle if you want to take it up. Try to avoid such disturbances where women relatives or friends are concerned, because the outlook for victory upon your part in such circumstances is rather dark. If you must fight, pick a man! Sage counsel no doubt, which I wish I had imbibed with that same maternal lactation, but impartially offered also to the many people born on that day who were also destined to die on it.
Christopher Hitchens (Hitch 22: A Memoir)
When Ted and I begin living together we shall become a team better than Mr. and Mrs. Yeats—he being a competent astrologist, reading horoscopes, and me being a tarot-pack reader, and, when we have enough money, a crystal-gazer.
Sylvia Plath (Sylvia Plath: Her Drawings)
I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time—when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.
Carl Sagan (The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark)
The ascendant rules the outer personality - the way a person actually presents to the world.
Rosemary Breen (Horoscope Compatibility for All the Zodiac Signs)
O Suburbs of Despair where nothing but the weather ever changes!
Dana Gioia (Daily Horoscope: Poems)
Fact. Pisces is THE most wobbly sign of the Zodiac.
Mary English (How to Survive a Pisces : Real Life Guidance on How to get on and be Friends with the last Sign of the Zodiac)
No one's going to notice the difference between you pushing dandelions or daisies, so leave them something worth talking about.
Amrit Brar (Shitty Horoscopes)
Why do you haunt me? You, like a tattoo on my tongue, like the bay leaf at the bottom of every pan. You who sprawled out beside me and sang my horoscope to a Schubert symphony, something about travel and money again, and we lay there, both of our breaths bad, both of our underwear dangling elastic, and then you turned toward me with a gaze like two matches, putting the horoscope aside, you traced my buried ribs with your index finger, lingered at my collarbone, admiring it as one might a flying buttress, murmuring: Nice clavicle. And me, too new at it and scared, not knowing what to say, whispering: You should see my ten-speed.
Lorrie Moore (Self-Help)
I was told I must change my rigid attitude. and it would surely change my mood... I was told I appeared to always be down... Never a smile...always a frown... So I lifted myself out of my wheelchair.. and made up my mind to mend my " err " But then the inevitable happened you see... I fell flat on my face...however I now actually now do look up...at everything around me... * ps..stupid horoscope !!!!
k.j. force
How these insane things kept happening, these eruptions of senseless violence, of anger and ignorance and greed and mendacity, like ancient fissures bubbling up under the surface, and what—we were just supposed to go on with our lives? Wake up the next day like nothing happened, like we hadn’t lost our minds? Just turn the page, to the baseball scores or the horoscopes or celebrity birthdays? (Nothing to see here, just America.)
Jess Walter (So Far Gone)
I don't play the lottery. I don't care what my horoscope says. I think most things about the world could be improved if people thought more about what they're doing. When someone gets upset with their computer, I tend to side with the computer. I think art is overrated, and bridges are underrated. In fact, I don't understand why bridges aren't art. It seems to me they're penalized for having a use. If I make a bridge that ends in midair, that's a sculpture. But put it between two landmasses and let it ferry two hundred thousand cars per day and it's infrastructure. That makes no sense.
Max Barry (Machine Man)
Keeping an open mind is a virtue,” Carl Sagan wrote in The Demon-Haunted World, the last book he published, but “not so open that your brains fall out…. I have a foreboding of an America when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.” That was twenty years ago.
Kurt Andersen (Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History)
Harris loved to read and he shared everything he read. He read to whoever happened to be in the room from whatever paper he happened to be making his way through. Ann Landers and the horoscope, of course, headlines, cartoons, Miss Manners, Heloise, the lives of others, in many forms, long articles on astronomy or anthropology, political pieces, op-ed pieces, book reviews, church bazaars, executions, plane crashes, disco artists, whatever caught his interest.
Lewis Nordan (Lightning Song)
Ancient astrology was rather different from the modern horoscope. Its more learned practitioners enjoyed intellectual respectability, and there was a substantial overlap between astrology and philosophy. People would consult astrologers on anything, from the time and manner in which they were going to die to who was likely to win in the chariot-races that afternoon. The chronology of the origins and development of astrology are impossible to establish, and were debated even in the ancient world. Suffice it to say here that the Western tradition was one of many traditions: Indian, Chinese, Middle Eastern. It was Ptolemy, the Hellenistic geographer and astrologer, who first laid the technical foundations of Western astrology in his Tetrabiblos (‘Four Books’). But the rise in the prominence of astrology was closely tied to the Roman imperial regime. It greatly benefited emperors to have their sovereignty ‘written in the stars’.
Helen Morales (Classical Mythology: A Very Short Introduction)
I love fortune readings! because when I get in troubles, if the reading says that I am in a lucky day, I can think my troubles are just some kind of mistakes, and if the reading says that I am in the unlucky day, I can think that my troubles are just because of my bad luck. Either ways, I can know the reason of my troubles.
Hiroko Sakai
Implicitly or explicitly, the rhythms of our lives, the movement from season to season, the patterns of the winds, and the pulse of the tides all depend on the apparent motions of the sun and moon and stars. Yet most modern urban dwellers are only dimly aware of the night sky ― the stars and their myriad forms. They are only slightly more aware of the phases of the moon or the motions of the sun. Even those who take the daily horoscope seriously generally have a very poor notion of its connection with astronomical phenomena.
Ray A. Williamson (Living the Sky: The Cosmos of the American Indian)
Night coaxed out the stars, my jailers.
Roshani Chokshi (The Star-Touched Queen (The Star-Touched Queen, #1))
... all I can say is that you could have no better or more trustworthy companion than your own unconscious. ...
Karen M. Hamaker-Zondag (Twelfth House: The Hidden Power in the Horoscope)
Scorpios are tasked with awakening people to the depths of their soul. They transform for the better or sink deeper; depending on how they take the lessons that we show them.
Robin S. Baker
the planets show what is happening, the signs how it is happening, and the houses where it is happening.
Howard Sasportas (The Twelve Houses: Exploring the Houses of the Horoscope)
the Sun is the kind of hero we are, but the Ascendant is the quest on which we must embark. The Sun is why we are here; the Ascendant is how we get there.
Howard Sasportas (The Twelve Houses: Exploring the Houses of the Horoscope)
I was so depressed last night that I read my horoscope
Cazzie David (No One Asked for This: Essays)
My horoscope had told me I'd be ruled by Venus today. And that was the horniest fucking planet in the solar system. I should have been prepared to deal with it.
Caroline Peckham (Ruthless Fae (Zodiac Academy, #2))
Whenever I am going through good phase, i don't give a damn about what my horoscope says.
I Love the way you love me
Is anyone know about term 'Astrology' and how many you are believe in Horoscope?
Vashikaran Prediction
Our satellites are reaching stars And there are people who are still searching stars in Horoscopes
Subhasis Das (I.T. Hurts)
You’re like a horoscope in horticulture.
Seanan McGuire (Reflections (Indexing, #2))
His answer was that of a makeshift doctor, a médecin Tant Pis, who was no more guided by the Hippocratic oath than by the advice of a horoscope.
Dean Koontz (Quicksilver)
Hippocratic oath than by the advice of a horoscope.
Dean Koontz (Quicksilver)
They're into horoscopes, crystals, tarot cards, all that. What they weren't into was being parents.
Rick Riordan (Daughter of the Deep)
The sign seemed like her fortune, her horoscope, her Magic 8 Ball answer.
Melissa Senate (The Secret of Joy)
The luminaries in the horoscope are truly instructors, reflecting what we could one day become, portraying in symbolic form the best of what might be achieved.
Liz Greene (The Luminaries: The Psychology of the Sun and Moon in the Horoscope, Vol 3 (Seminars in Psychological Astrology) (Volume 3))
My Hero Just as the hare is zipping across the finish line, the tortoise has stopped once again by the roadside, this time to stick out his neck and nibble a bit of sweet grass, unlike the previous time when he was distracted by a bee humming in the heart of a wildflower.
Billy Collins (Horoscopes for the Dead)
Did your horoscope say your stars were in a bad alignment? Did an entrail reading priest find something nasty in the offal? I mean, look, if you know something I should know, let’s talk about it. If you got a racially justify belief, more power to you. But how many times do we have to go through this? We are grownups we should be responsive to facts. Not feelings.
Robert Ludlum (The Ambler Warning)
Oh, I already loved my husband, of course, but this was different. That had been a decision; this was out of my control, an impulse as difficult to resist as gravity. Mad love, crazy love, drop, sink, stumble. The kind of love where every little thing is a sign, a portent: the song on the radio, his Christian name staring up at you from a magazine you’re flicking through, your horoscope in the paper. Normally I don’t even believe in horoscopes, for God’s sake. Love without holes or patches or compromises, soft as an easy chair, a many splendoured thing.
Kylie Ladd (After the Fall)
Frank, have you seen today’s obits?” Gerald asked. “Never look at them,” I replied. “I only read the comics, sports, and horoscopes.” “Can’t you see I’m being serious?” “Who bit the dust, then?
Ed Lynskey (Iceman (P.I. Frank Johnson Mystery Series Book 26))
Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time—when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.
Carl Sagan (The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark)
child is born on that day and at that hour when the celestial rays are in mathematical harmony with his or her individual karma. The resulting horoscope is a challenging portrait revealing his or her unalterable past, and its probable future result. But the natal chart can be rightly interpreted only by women and men of intuitive wisdom: these are few. ~ ~ ~ Swami Sri Yukteswar Guru of the great Paramahansa Yogananda
Jeffrey Green (Jeffrey Wolf Green Evolutionary Astrology: Structure of the Soul)
From uncoiled wings of the burning swan after sea of blood was born out of green caterpillar that skin sheared moon from cloud’s underbelly ordered waves to abolish horoscopes on crabs’ breasts . On the evergreen epiglotis of lotus full to the brim the pollen fiddling honey bee waved her double scarf searched for drunk village of pride red beating crowd humming songs sleeping side by side of worried distance ( From 'Selected Poems' 1961 - 2004
Malay Roy Choudhury
A man is allowed to visit Heaven and Hell. In Hell, he sees a large gathering of people sitting around a long table set with rich and delectable food. And yet these people are miserable and starving. He soon discovers that the reason for their dreadful state is that the spoons and forks provided for them are longer than their arms. As a result, they are unable to bring the food to their mouths and feed themselves. Then the man is shown Heaven. He finds the same table set out there, with the same extra-long eating utensils. But, in Heaven, instead of just trying to feed their own selves, each person uses his or her spoon and fork to feed one another. They are all well-fed and happy.
Howard Sasportas (The Twelve Houses: Exploring the Houses of the Horoscope)
It would seem, O Nushain, that you have doubted your own horoscope,' said the guide, with a certain irony. 'However, even a bad astrologer, on occasion, may read the heavens aright. Obey, then, the stars that decreed your journey.
Clark Ashton Smith
The Sun and planets represent the spiritual consciousness in the heaven world ; the signs of the zodiac represent the astral or psychic consciousness ; and the houses of the horoscope as a whole, represent the physical consciousness.
Alan Leo (Symbolism and Astrology: An Introduction to Esoteric Astrology)
have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time—when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.
Carl Sagan (The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark)
we all have a tendency to become so ‘caught up’ and identified with activity and external happenings that we neglect and lose touch with the ‘I’ that is there underneath it all. We are so engaged in what we are seeing, what we are feeling, or what we are doing, that we forget about the ‘I’ that is doing the seeing, having the feelings or performing the actions.
Howard Sasportas (The Twelve Houses: Exploring the Houses of the Horoscope)
Grave What do you think of my new glasses I asked as I stood under a shade tree before the joined grave of my parents, and what followed was a long silence that descended on the rows of the dead and on the fields and the woods beyond, one of the one hundred kinds of silence according to the Chinese belief, each one distinct from the others, but the differences being so faint that only a few special monks were able to tell them apart. They make you look very scholarly, I heard my mother say once I lay down on the ground and pressed an ear into the soft grass. Then I rolled over and pressed my other ear to the ground, the ear my father likes to speak into, but he would say nothing, and I could not find a silence among the 100 Chinese silences that would fit the one that he created even though I was the one who had just made up the business of the 100 Chinese silences - the Silence of the Night Boat and the Silence of the Lotus, cousin to the Silence of the Temple Bell only deeper and softer, like petals, at its farthest edges.
Billy Collins (Horoscopes for the Dead)
Generally speaking, it is Pisces who provides most of the emotional input into your relationship but that doesn’t mean The Goat is unfeeling or insensitive. Moreover, it is the Fish who provides the extreme highs and low in your relationship and, strangely enough, it is this rollercoaster ride that helps Pisces cope with the monotony and routine and control that is the Goat’s preferred way of living.
Rosemary Breen
A horoscope is a specific map, or picture, of the heavens that is cast for the date, time, and location of your birth. The positions of the sun, moon, and planets, as well as the sign that hovers at the horizon, are all placed around the wheel of the zodiac to reveal the intricate mathematical relationships that portray your personal blueprint and potential for development. This map can reveal your physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual gifts and challenges, and you are always free to grow and change, according to your own volition. Also noteworthy are the nodal points, or the locations where the path of Earth and the path of the moon intersect, forming what is known as the “head and tail of the sky dragon,” or the north and south nodes. The location of the celestial dragon in a chart is of utmost importance, for it indicates the direction in which you are moving to achieve the fulfillment of your personal destiny, as well as the place in the past that you are emerging from. Once you are born into physical reality, you unfold your life within an imprint of cosmic energy that embodies a plan of intent and purpose, a plan designed and approved by you. Throughout
Barbara Marciniak (Path of Empowerment: New Pleiadian Wisdom for a World in Chaos)
Hey Circe, how come your horoscope predictions are never that a hot girl is gonna fall madly in love with me forever and ever?” “Uh, cause you're a dork Seth!” She taunted. “Oh yeah,” Seth said happily smiling at her. “That explains the devastating loneliness and constant abuse by alpha males…
Joy Richard (Easy "A" (Ballistic Incantations, #1))
Virtually every major move and decision the Reagans made during my time as White House chief of staff was cleared in advance with a woman in San Francisco who drew up horoscopes to make certain that the planets were in favorable alignment for the enterprise. —Donald Regan, in his memoir, For the Record
Julia Heaberlin (Night Will Find You)
Even though part of me passed it off as rubbish, I still had another part that believed there to be some truth in it. When no one was looking I read my daily horoscope each morning, hoping for a five-star day. Anything less than four stars and I didn’t bother reading it. Deep down, all that stuff gave me the heebie-jeebies.
Michael Looft (Crossing Allenby Bridge)
SHELLY: If you know someone's chart, you actually have a tremendous advantage over them. Not only in terms of timing factors, but in terms of working magic on their horoscope. Some say that is the reason Adolf Hitler put several dates or times out for his horoscope, so that his enemies wouldn't know exactly when he was born.
Ray Grasse (An Infinity of Gods: Conversations with an Unconventional Mystic, The Teachings of Shelly Trimmer)
As a special branch of general philosophy, pathogenesis had never been explored. In my opinion it had never been approached in a strictly scientific fashion--that is to say, objectively, amorally, intellectually. All those who have written on the subject are filled with prejudice. Before searching out and examining the mechanism of causes of disease, they treat of 'disease as such', condemn it as an exceptional and harmful condition, and start out by detailing the thousand and one ways of combating it, disturbing it, destroying it; they define health, for this purpose, as a 'normal' condition that is absolute and immutable. Diseases ARE. We do not make or unmake them at will. We are not their masters. They make us, they form us. They may even have created us. They belong to this state of activity which we call life. They may be its main activity. They are one of the many manifestations of universal matter. They may be the principal manifestation of that matter which we will never be able to study except through the phenomena of relationships and analogies. Diseases are a transitory, intermediary, future state of health. It may be that they are health itself. Coming to a diagnosis is, in a way, casting a physiological horoscope. What convention calls health is, after all, no more than this or that passing aspect of a morbid condition, frozen into an abstraction, a special case already experienced, recognized, defined, finite, extracted and generalized for everybody's use. Just as a word only finds its way into the Dictionary Of The French Academy when it is well worn stripped of the freshness of its popular origin or of the elegance of its poetic value, often more than fifty years after its creation (the last edition of the learned Dictionary is dated 1878), just as the definition given preserves a word, embalms it in its decrepitude, but in a pose which is noble, hypocritical and arbitrary--a pose it never assumed in the days of its vogue, while it was still topical, living and meaningful--so it is that health, recognized as a public Good, is only the sad mimic of some illness which has grown unfashionable, ridiculous and static, a solemnly doddering phenomenon which manages somehow to stand on its feet between the helping hands of its admirers, smiling at them with its false teeth. A commonplace, a physiological cliche, it is a dead thing. And it may be that health is death itself. Epidemics, and even more diseases of the will or collective neuroses, mark off the different epochs of human evolution, just as tellurian cataclysms mark the history of our planet.
Blaise Cendrars (Moravagine)
Everyone knows that a horoscope is like a shell: it needs to be wide and hollow enough to accommodate exactly what we need to hear... Its capacity for multiple interpretations – wasn't a failing. On the contrary, this was the characteristic – the only one, but still – it shared with all great literature: its universal ambition.
Laia Jufresa (Umami)
An astrological placement describes an arrow which points somewhere, a creative energy which gradually layers flesh onto the bare bones of archetypal patterning, an intelligent movement which, over time, fills in the stark black-and-white outlines of the essential life-myth with the subtle colours of experience and individual choice.
Liz Greene (The Luminaries: The Psychology of the Sun and Moon in the Horoscope, Vol 3 (Seminars in Psychological Astrology) (Volume 3))
Yuri sat on the couch to look at a stack of tennis magazines. He flipped through one at random. It fell open to the horoscope page. "Astrology Corner", he told me. "And it said, right there, in black and white, I swear, Maria, it said: 'The number one women's tennis player in the world will have the initials M.S. and she will be right-handed.
Maria Sharapova (Unstoppable: My Life So Far)
The flight was delayed two hours. I had never been unaccompanied in the international terminal before, and wandered around for a while reading my horoscope in magazines and looking in all the shops. Brookstone was selling a “quiet hair dryer” that let you hold a phone conversation while blow-drying your hair, without the other person knowing.
Elif Batuman (The Idiot)
I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...
Carl Sagan (The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark)
It takes a very special person to unleash a #Capricorn’s inner passions.
Horoscopes
Never measure the height of a mountain, until you have reached the top. Then you will see how low it was. Dag Hammarskjöld
Howard Sasportas (The Twelve Houses: Exploring the Houses of the Horoscope)
This book will get you doing science with him, learning the science as and when he learned it. From counting to 9,999 on your fingers to casting a horoscope or curing dysentery, understanding something of how medieval science was not just thought but really done – not just admiring astrolabes but weighing the brass in your hands – is essential to appreciating its achievements.
Seb Falk (The Light Ages: The Surprising Story of Medieval Science)
I should warn you that I’m not taken with horoscopes and such,” I told her. She licked her lips again and said nothing. “If you must know, I’m a goat,” I said. “That’s right, a fecking goat. There’s a whole nation of people behind the East Wall who say I was born in the year of the goat. I’ve no time for any system that has me as a goat. I don’t care how ancient their civilization is.
Mark Lawrence (King of Thorns (Broken Empire, #2))
Annoyed that although outlawed in Rome, astrology was nevertheless alive and well, Cicero noted that at Cannae in 216 B.C., Hannibal, leading about 50,000 Carthaginian and allied troops, crushed the much larger Roman army, slaughtering more than 60,000 of its 80,000 soldiers. “Did all the Romans who fell at Cannae have the same horoscope?” Cicero asked. “Yet all had one and the same end.
Leonard Mlodinow (The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives)
Sometimes it is easier to see clearly into the liar than into the man who tells the truth. Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.
Ash Bishop (The Horoscope Writer)
In Isaiah’s description of the downfall of Babylon, the city so famed for its astrologers, we find mention of Hobhre Shamayim,[344] that is, dividers of the heavens, astrologers who divide the heavens into houses for the convenience of their prognostications. The same persons are then described as Chozim bakkokhabhim, star-gazers, those who study the stars for the purpose of taking horoscopes.
G.H. Pember (Earth's Earliest Ages and Their Connection with Modern Spiritualism and Theosophy)
But there’s another reason: Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time—when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.
Carl Sagan (The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark)
New Age spirituality purports to promote change – its mantra is ‘transformation’ – but, in reality, it endorses the status quo. It preaches changing oneself to accept the world as it is. New Agers are too busy with their affirmations and introspections to do anything like take direct action. Indeed, in some books the advice to unleash one’s inner goddess turns out to be little more than to bring back the old ‘domestic goddess’. Using myth as one’s personal charter is nothing new (as we saw in Chapter 3), but when Alexander the Great chose Achilles, the psychopathic hero of Homer’s Iliad, to revere and emulate, he did so with action in mind. Alexander used classical myth as his ‘life coach’ and changed the world. New Agers use classical myth to ensure that the spirit is soothed, the horoscope reassuring, and the house clean, but the world stays the same.
Helen Morales (Classical Mythology: A Very Short Introduction)
that they always give their horoscope readers (like Joyce every morning, over vegetable juice she made herself in a special machine) that special eerie feeling of particularity and insight, exploiting the psychological fact that most people are narcissistic and prone to the illusion that they and their problems are uniquely special and that if they’re feeling a certain way then surely they’re the only person who is feeling like that.
David Foster Wallace (The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel)
That's cool," he says. "Yeah," I say, and we go into another marathon pause. "So..." he finally says. "Think you can start talking to me again?" "Oh,so you noticed the silencio treatment?" I tease. My horoscope in Seventeen this month encourages me to "take a romantic risk," so I'm going for it. "Yeah,I noticed when I had to do Actividad thirty-three as both fruit vendor and customer," he says, and I can hear him grinning through the phone.
Alecia Whitaker (The Queen of Kentucky)
Keeping an open mind is a virtue,” Carl Sagan wrote in The Demon-Haunted World, the last book he published, but “not so open that your brains fall out….I have a foreboding of an America when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.” That was twenty years ago.
Kurt Andersen (Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History)
(Swann’s illness was the same that had killed his mother, who had been attacked by it at precisely the age which he had now reached. Our existences are in truth, owing to heredity, as full of cabalistic ciphers, of horoscopic castings as if there really were sorcerers in the world. And just as there is a certain duration of life for humanity in general, so there is one for families in particular, that is to say, in any one family, for the members of it who resemble one another.
Marcel Proust (In Search Of Lost Time (All 7 Volumes) (ShandonPress))
The other noble Scholars arrived shortly afterwards. They are all very memorablie famose. Mr Meldreth, a sweet, shy gentleman the colour of dust, is for Insects and haz 237 dead ones in a box. Mr Shepreth haz discovered the date upon which the Citie of London waz first built. This, being like to its Birthe-daye, haz enabled him to caste its horoscope: he knowes all its Future. Dr Foxton haz shewne by Irrefutable Arguments that Cornishmen are a kind of Fishe. His beard curles naturallie - a certaine sign of witt.
Susanna Clarke (The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories)
Then she reached for her bag and took out a small book. She explained she had found it at a store near her home, and that it described the nature of your character based on the date of your birth. (...) I thought some of it was true and some of it was not, but the real truth was how such things allowed someone to talk about you, or what you had done or why you did it, in a way that unraveled your character into distinct traits. It made you seem readable to them, or to yourself, which could feel like a revelation.
Jessica Au (Cold Enough for Snow)
Those are for auguring, dikri, for scrying futures,” wheedled a matronly looking being. She had wings pinioned to her back that were dull gold and edged in fire. “I’m not interested,” I said, thinking of my own horoscope. “What about a love charm, then?” persisted the owner, pushing a flower carved of pearl to me. “To awaken your lover’s interest,” she added with a wink. At this, Amar walked to the table and slid the flower rather ungently back toward the owner. “I am her husband. She needs no charm to hold my interest.
Roshani Chokshi (The Star-Touched Queen (The Star-Touched Queen, #1))
Changing the spelling of one's name to ensure success, performing rituals for good luck, wearing colored gem stones for success in business – all these fall into the same category of psychological reinforcement. Hence, emerged the blood-sucking professions of astrology, palmistry, vastushastra, numerology etc. The very existence of these fraudulent professions is predicated on the fear and anxiety of vulnerable masses. Thus, a person’s superstitious beliefs become the tool of exploitation in the hands of ruthless fraudsters.
Abhijit Naskar
The stars, filled with cold light and secrets, held no emotion in their fixed language of fate. Emotion belonged to life, a thing the stars could never experience. I, not the starlight, shaped my decisions. And it was me, not the evening sky, who shouldered the responsibility for decisions gone wrong. My horoscope had already come to pass, leaving nothing before me but a future ripe with the unknown. The stars had already told me everything they knew. And even though it left me untethered from any cosmic map I had once known… I felt freed.
Roshani Chokshi (The Star-Touched Queen (The Star-Touched Queen, #1))
Spending a week listening to Archbishop Tutu and the Dalai Lama alternate between teasing each other for not acting holy enough, and then crying over the profound suffering that is the human experience, changes me. Every day I walk away with some new nugget about the way I want to live my life—in service to others, accepting that I am always a work in progress, being more compassionate and more forgiving. Living in gratitude. Every day of the dialogues seems like a horoscope—there’s something specific relating to my life that I need to hear.
Lara Love Hardin (The Many Lives of Mama Love: A Memoir of Lying, Stealing, Writing, and Healing)
Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time—when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness. The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.
Carl Sagan (The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark)
We spent the rest of the day lost in that room of old planets and forgotten meteors. I stepped across flattened comets and spilled haloes of things that may have burned for centuries or may have always been illusions. It didn’t matter. For the first time, I felt like I was seeing things differently. Amar kept testing my perspective. He clasped nebulas in my hands and told me to think of them as fate. Being with him was like seeing for the first time. I even started to think differently about the horoscope. Could I see a glimmer of silver in all that darkness? I wanted to. And now, I almost did.
Roshani Chokshi (The Star-Touched Queen (The Star-Touched Queen, #1))
Mary chimed in: “The Dee of Shakespeare’s time was famous, a sorcerer with political allies all over Europe. He did horoscopes to advise the Queen about her enemies.” “Thanks to the little runt sounding off to the press, I’m well aware of Dr John Dee,” snarled Robbin’ Robin. “Did you know our Billy Dee says he can conjure spirits from the Parliaments as far back as his namesake in the 1560s? That’s how the PM won the damn election. Dead politicians popped up at Dee’s command. They begged my colleagues to vote for my rival ‘to save the nation’.” Robbin’ Robin did the air quotes that so irritated Mary.
Susan Rowland (The Swan Lake Murders (Mary Wandwalker #4))
Ringrazio tutti coloro che non amo perché non mi fanno venire il mal di testa non mi fanno scrivere lunghe lettere non agitano i miei sogni non li attendo con ansia non leggo i loro oroscopi sul giornale non compongo il loro numero di telefono non li penso. Li ringrazio molto non mi mettono in subbuglio la vita”. "I thank everyone I don't love. They don't cause me heartache they don't make me write long letters they don't disturb my dreams I don't await them anxiously I don't read their horoscopes in magazines I don't dial their numbers I don't think of them. I thank them a lot they don't turn my life upside down.
Dunya Mikhail
How boundless is the horoscope of spring! One can read it in a thousand different ways, interpret it blindly, spell it out at will, happy to be able to decipher anything at all amid the misleading divinations of birds. The text can be read forward or backward, lose its sense and find it again in many versions, in a thousand alternatives. Because the text of spring is marked by hints, ellipses, lines dotted on an empty azure, and because the gaps between the syllables are filled by the frivolous guesses and surmises of birds, my story, like that text, will follow many different tracks and will be punctuated by springlike dashes, sighs, and dots.
Bruno Schulz (Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass)
Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time—when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness. The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance. As I write, the number-one videocassette rental in America is the movie Dumb and Dumber. “Beavis and Butthead” remain popular (and influential) with young TV viewers. The plain lesson is that study and learning—not just of science, but of anything—are avoidable, even undesirable.
Carl Sagan (The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark)
I think we all feel great ambivalence at the sight of our own Horoscope. On the one hand we’re proud to see that the sky is imprinted on our individual life, like a postmark with a date stamped on a letter – this makes it distinct, one of a kind. But at the same time it’s a form of imprisonment in space, like a tattooed prison number. There’s no escaping it. I cannot be someone other than I am. How awful. We’d prefer to think we’re free, able to reinvent ourselves whenever we choose. This connection with something as great and monumental as the sky makes us feel uncomfortable. We’d rather be small, and then our petty little sins would be forgivable. Therefore I’m convinced that we should get to know our prison very well.
Olga Tokarczuk (Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead)
In contemporary Western society, buying a magazine on astrology - at a newsstand, say - is easy; it is much harder to find one on astronomy. Virtually every newspaper in America has a daily column on astrology; there are hardly any that have even a weekly column on astronomy. There are ten times more astrologers in the United States than astronomers. At parties, when I meet people that do not know I’m a scientist, I am sometimes asked “Are you a Gemini?” (chances of success, one in twelve), or “What sign are you?” Much more rarely am I asked “Have you heard that gold is made in supernova explosions?” or “When do you think Congress will approve a Mars Rover?” (...) And personal astrology is with us still: consider two different newspaper astrology columns published in the same city on the same day. For example, we can examine The New York Post and the New York Daily News on September 21, 1979. Suppose you are a Libra - that is, born between September 23 and October 22. According to the astrologer for the Post, ‘a compromise will help ease tension’; useful, perhaps, but somewhat vague. According to the Daily News’ astrologer, you must ‘demand more of yourself’, an admonition that is also vague but also different. These ‘predictions’ are not predictions; rather they are pieces of advice - they tell you what to do, not what will happen. Deliberately, they are phrased so generally that they could apply to anyone. And they display major mutual inconsistencies. Why are they published as unapologetically as sport statistics and stock market reports? Astrology can be tested by the lives of twins. There are many cases in which one twin is killed in childhood, in a riding accident, say, or is struck by lightning, while the other lives to a prosperous old age. Each was born in precisely the same place and within minutes of the other. Exactly the same planets were rising at their births. If astrology were valid, how could two such twins have such profoundly different fates? It also turns out that astrologers cannot even agree among themselves on what a given horoscope means. In careful tests, they are unable to predict the character and future of people they knew nothing about except their time and place of birth.
Carl Sagan (Cosmos)
But when is a rule really just a suggestion? And when do suggestions morph into rules? Every day, physical signs tell all of us what to do, written instructions direct us how to behave, and social guidelines urge us to act within specific parameters. In fact, we also make lots of rules for ourselves, in large part encouraged by others. These rules become woven into our individual fabric as we go through life. We draw imaginary lines around what we think we can do—lines that often limit us much more than the rules imposed by society at large. We define ourselves by our professions, our income, where we live, the car we drive, our education, and even by our horoscope. Each definition locks us into specific assumptions about who we are and what we can do.
Tina Seelig (What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20)
Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time—when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness
Carl Sagan
Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time—when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness. The
Carl Sagan (The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark)
Partnered with Death itself,” he said, repeating a part of my horoscope. A harsh laugh escaped him. “I understand now.” The Raja moved away from his mirror wall, his eyes twinkling as he bowed low. The gesture was wrong. My cheeks flared with heat. “No,” I said, “please don’t do that.” Pressing my palms against the glass, I willed it away, and slowly, it became thinner and thinner until it disappeared. The Raja, still bent in a bow, looked up in surprise as I walked into his cell. I lifted him up by the shoulders, not letting myself flinch when my fingers brushed against the blood on his armor. “You do not need to bow to me, Father.” The Raja smiled. “Your forgiveness makes my hell easier to bear.” This conversation, this air of ease unshackled from courtly posturing, struck me. It was so natural. We might have even been close in another lifetime. “I do not know how you became a princess of Bharata,” he said. “Who knows how our last lives slip into the ones we live in now. I will never know those memories. And perhaps that is for the best.” A lump rose in my throat. I will never know those memories. The tree behind the chained door…it had so many memories. All of which, I was convinced, belonged to me. Nritti’s image flashed in my head, bright as a flame. I didn’t know her from this life, but I must have known her from before. My father must have seen a look cross over my face because he stepped away from me. “You do not belong here, daughter. Go. Be who you will be. Do not waste your life mourning the dead.” I nodded tightly, my throat thick with so many things left unsaid. “I will not forget you, Father.” He smiled. “That pleases me. A memory is a fine legacy to leave behind.
Roshani Chokshi (The Star-Touched Queen (The Star-Touched Queen, #1))
After All the Lullabies Vanish From the Library" In a bullet-riddled villa we choreograph swordfights and sing to militant termites feasting on the walls. We read newspapers from headlines to horoscope. Our nights too long. Our bed too big for every room. We turn invisible doorknobs, light ignus fatuus chandeliers. The storyteller paints her body when she loses her voice, and we pass her around a circle, naming what we see— Myrmidons! Saturn!–a storm flickering in the god’s eye. On her hip, the ascendant unborn. A thigh of white bellbirds sunning on an alligator’s back. An arm of starfall in daylight. We warn the children it will be a small story, a smaller house, the smallest mermaid’s purse preserved in a jar. Era uma vez… Lightning on the Atlantic looking for trees. A nautilus moaning a monody. There is no ending to be had. Sleep kisses our eyelids. Stars wheel in the dreams. The river plants its tide in us, saying, sea, sea, sea. 32 Poems (Vol. 10, No. 2, Fall 2012)
Traci Brimhall
One other thing. And this really matters for readers of this book. According to official Myers–Briggs documents, the test can ‘give you an insight into what kinds of work you might enjoy and be successful doing’. So if you are, like me, classified as ‘INTJ’ (your dominant traits are being introverted, intuitive and having a preference for thinking and judging), the best-fit occupations include management consultant, IT professional and engineer.30 Would a change to one of these careers make me more fulfilled? Unlikely, according to respected US psychologist David Pittenger, because there is ‘no evidence to show a positive relation between MBTI type and success within an occupation…nor is there any data to suggest that specific types are more satisfied within specific occupations than are other types’. Then why is the MBTI so popular? Its success, he argues, is primarily due to ‘the beguiling nature of the horoscope-like summaries of personality and steady marketing’.31 Personality tests have their uses, even if they do not reveal any scientific ‘truth’ about us. If we are in a state of confusion they can be a great emotional comfort, offering a clear diagnosis of why our current job may not be right, and suggesting others that might suit us better. They also raise interesting hypotheses that aid self-reflection: until I took the MBTI, I had certainly never considered that IT could offer me a bright future (by the way, I apparently have the wrong personality type to be a writer). Yet we should be wary about relying on them as a magic pill that enables us suddenly to hit upon a dream career. That is why wise career counsellors treat such tests with caution, using them as only one of many ways of exploring who you are. Human personality does not neatly reduce into sixteen or any other definitive number of categories: we are far more complex creatures than psychometric tests can ever reveal. And as we will shortly learn, there is compelling evidence that we are much more likely to find fulfilling work by conducting career experiments in the real world than by filling out any number of questionnaires.32
Roman Krznaric (How to Find Fulfilling Work (The School of Life))
SHE HAD WATCHED THEM in supermarkets and she knew the signs. At seven o'clock on a Saturday evening they would be standing in the checkout line reading the horoscope in Harper's Bazaar and in their carts would be a single lamb chop and maybe two cans of cat food and the Sunday morning paper, the early edition with the comics wrapped outside. They would be very pretty some of the time, their skirts the right length and their sunglasses the right tint and maybe only a little vulnerable tightness around the mouth, but there they were, one lamb chop and some cat food and the morning paper. To avoid giving off the signs, Maria shopped always for a household, gallons of grapefruit juice, quarts of green chile salsa, dried lentils and alphabet noodles, rigatoni and canned yams, twenty-pound boxes of laundry detergent. She knew all the indices to the idle lonely, never bought a small tube of toothpaste, never dropped a magazine in her shopping cart. The house in Beverly Hills overflowed with sugar, corn-muffin mix, frozen roasts and Spanish onions. Maria ate cottage cheese.
Joan Didion (Play It As It Lays)
In Giorgi’s system, as with Pico, the system is not astrological in the sense of judicial astrology in which man is conditioned by his horoscope, some of the influences in which might be bad, for example a bad influence of Saturn. In this system, as with Lull and Pico, all the celestial influences are good, and it is only a bad reception of them which can make them bad or unfortunate. There is thus free-will in the system, free-will to make a good, not a bad, use of the stars. The planets are linked to the angelic hierarchies and the Sephiroth. Thus the planetary influences pour down on man purified by the Christian angels and the Cabalist Sephiroth. Though all are equally good they are placed in a descending order of importance matched to the order of the hierarchies.18 Thus there are no bad or unfortunate planets. On the contrary, Saturn, unfortunate and bad in normal astrological theory is placed highest in the list. Being the outermost or highest planet in the cosmic order, he is nearest to the divine source of being and therefore associated with the loftiest contemplations. ‘Saturnians’ are not those poor and unfortunate characters of traditional astrology but inspired students and contemplators of highest truths.
Frances A. Yates (The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (Routledge Classics))
Have you ever heard of twin flames?” he asked. I raised my eyebrows, surprised by the change of subject. “I think I might have read it on a horoscope website or something.” His lips twitched into half a smile. “Some people believe a twin flame is a soul split into two bodies. These people will be so closely tied they always find each other.” “Like soul mates?” I asked. He shook his head. “Soul mates are people who agree to meet in this lifetime, if you believe that. But it’s thought that twin flames are kind of mirror souls. They show each other what’s good about the other, but also what they have to work on.” My breath caught as I listed to his words, deeper than we’d really gone since I’d moved back home. “And author shave talked about twin flames in stories. You know, Emily Bronte said, ‘He’s more myself than I am. Whatever souls are made of, his and mine are the same.’” I searched his eyes wondering what that meant about us, a relationship that had hurt me to the core, but I still couldn’t manage to stay away. “Sometimes I wonder if that’s what we are. If you showed me what I was missing so I could get better. And I hate that mistake I made, but I know I’ve become a better man because of the lesson it forced me to learn.
Kelsie Hoss (Hello Heartbreaker (Hello, #6))
At first I thought you were your mother, come to free me from my hell. Like an angel. You take after her, though you are as young as I remember.” I stared at my ash-covered feet, and the hair that fell in a mussed braid by my side. I thought of Bharata’s dead walking past my bedroom while I slept. I thought of Vikram weeping for his dead mother while I kissed the Dharma Raja in a winter room. I was no angel. “Who rules in your stead?” “The yuvuraja, Skanda,” said the Raja, thoughtfully tugging on his beard. Death had not relieved him of all his habits. I almost smiled to see the familiar gesture. “I hope he remembers all I have said. Sometimes I expect to see him across my cell. And I do not know if he will be young as I remember him, or old because time has passed and I am here.” He looked at the ground. “Do not pity me, daughter. Everyone comes here. Some merely stay longer than others.” We stared at each other through the glass. I could feel his eyes searching me, trying to match up the memory of when he had last seen me to the person who stood before him now. “Partnered with Death itself,” he said, repeating a part of my horoscope. A harsh laugh escaped him. “I understand now.” The Raja moved away from his mirror wall, his eyes twinkling as he bowed low.
Roshani Chokshi (The Star-Touched Queen (The Star-Touched Queen, #1))
I saw… …Amar slumped onto his throne, refusing to look at the empty seat on his left. Gupta was at his side, his face pinched, skin sallow. “Go over every birth record, every horoscope until we find her again. I want--” He stopped, jaw tightening. “I need her back. I made a mistake.” “How will I know it’s her?” “The stars will not lie,” said Amar. “A girl partnered with Death, a marriage that puts her on the brink of destruction and peace, horror and happiness, dark and light. Find her.” “But even if you bring her back, how will she know--” “I have taken care of that,” he said sharply. In his hand was a small branch and a fledgling candle. “I have preserved every memory in the heart of Naraka.” “A fitting place,” said Gupta in a small voice, but he frowned. “But then what? Mortals cannot receive such divine information. It destroys them. Not even you can break those sacred boundaries.” “There is a way,” said Amar, breathing deeply. “I cannot tell them to a mortal. But if she becomes immortal…” “Ah…clever,” said Gupta. “The Otherworld may stop you from divulging those secrets, but a mortal that does not pass through the halls of the dead would eventually be deathless.” Amar nodded. “Sixty turns of the moon. A handful of weeks in our halls. And then I can reveal the memories of her past life. Her powers will be restored. She will be a queen once more. But until then, she needs protection. Nritti will no doubt try to find her. She knows she has gone missing. She can feel it, and it fuels her destructiveness. Nritti can never know where she is. Or who she was.
Roshani Chokshi (The Star-Touched Queen (The Star-Touched Queen, #1))
Amar reached for my hand and put something in my palm. I looked down: string. “For conquering,” he said. I stretched the string into a taut line. “Conquering what? Insects?” “No. Your enemies.” The stars. Fate. The string drooped in my fingers. “Why do you hate them?” he asked. “If Akaran has its eyes and ears in Bharata, then you already know,” I said darkly, thinking of the horoscope that had shadowed the past seventeen years. “Do you believe the horoscope?” “No.” I meant it. There was no proof. Sometimes, I still thought it was a hateful rumor born of Mother Dhina’s jealousy. “Then why hate the stars?” “For what they did. Or, I guess, what they made other people do,” I said softly. “For making me hated without reason and without evidence. Wouldn’t you hate distant jailers?” “I don’t believe they’re jailers. I believe the stars.” “Then you’re a fool to marry me.” He laughed. “I believe them, but I choose to read them differently.” “I don’t see any happy way to explain death and destruction.” “Doesn’t death make room for life? Autumn trees die to make room for new shoots. And destruction is part of that cycle. After all, a devastating forest fire lets the ground start anew.” I stared at him. No one had ever said anything like that in Bharata. No one had ever challenged the stars. And yet, the light contoured him, clung to him, like the stars knew and believed everything he said. Maybe I believed him too. All I had done was curse the stars from a distance. I’d never thought to reinterpret what they meant. I turned around, as if seeing the night sky for the first time.
Roshani Chokshi (The Star-Touched Queen (The Star-Touched Queen, #1))
Beautiful,” said Amar. “I found it gruesome,” I said, shivering. Amar rose and walked to where I stood. “I was not talking about the story.” “Oh.” “Why do you like such a gruesome tale?” In Bharata, we were taught that it was a tale of the god’s might. But I saw another story within it: the play of interpretation that turned something terrifying and iron-clad into something that could be conquered. I was reminded of the star room where Amar had taken me only days ago. The story was like a different way of seeing. “It gave me hope…that maybe there was some way around the horoscope. It was a lesson in language too, almost like a riddle…” Amar stared at me and then he laughed. “Only my queen would find hope in horror.” He took my hand in his and his gaze was burning. “You are my hope and more.” “What does that make you? My horror?” “And more,” he said. All I saw were his eyes. Velvet dark. The kind of umbra that shadows envy. Amar stared at me and his gaze was desperate with hope. Reckless. I should’ve stopped. I should’ve stepped away. But I didn’t. I leaned forward, and a soft growl--like surrender--escaped his throat. He dug his fingers into my back and pulled me into a kiss. Amar’s kiss was furious. No heat. Just lightning. Or maybe that was what his touch teased out of me--vivid streaks of light, dusk and all her violent glory. I was lost. I leaned into his kiss and the world around us peeled into nothing. I felt like I could stand over chasms empty of time, and this moment, like a chain of soft-blooming stars, would still be ours. We kissed until we couldn’t breathe. And then we kissed until we needed the touch of one another like breath itself.
Roshani Chokshi (The Star-Touched Queen (The Star-Touched Queen, #1))
The reason for which a work of genius is not easily admired from the first is that the man who has created it is extraordinary, that few other men resemble him. It was Beethoven’s Quartets themselves (the Twelfth, Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth) that devoted half a century to forming, fashioning and enlarging a public for Beethoven’s Quartets, marking in this way, like every great work of art, an advance if not in artistic merit at least in intellectual society, largely composed to-day of what was not to be found when the work first appeared, that is to say of persons capable of enjoying it. What artists call posterity is the posterity of the work of art. It is essential that the work (leaving out of account, for brevity’s sake, the contingency that several men of genius may at the same time be working along parallel lines to create a more instructed public in the future, a public from which other men of genius shall reap the benefit) shall create its own posterity. For if the work were held in reserve, were revealed only to posterity, that audience, for that particular work, would be not posterity but a group of contemporaries who were merely living half-a-century later in time. And so it is essential that the artist (and this is what Vinteuil had done), if he wishes his work to be free to follow its own course, shall launch it, wherever he may find sufficient depth, confidently outward bound towards the future. And yet this interval of time, the true perspective in which to behold a work of art, if leaving it out of account is the mistake made by bad judges, taking it into account is at times a dangerous precaution of the good. No doubt one can easily imagine, by an illusion similar to that which makes everything on the horizon appear equidistant, that all the revolutions which have hitherto occurred in painting or in music did at least shew respect for certain rules, whereas that which immediately confronts us, be it impressionism, a striving after discord, an exclusive use of the Chinese scale, cubism, futurism or what you will, differs outrageously from all that have occurred before. Simply because those that have occurred before we are apt to regard as a whole, forgetting that a long process of assimilation has melted them into a continuous substance, varied of course but, taking it as a whole, homogeneous, in which Hugo blends with Molière. Let us try to imagine the shocking incoherence that we should find, if we did not take into account the future, and the changes that it must bring about, in a horoscope of our own riper years, drawn and presented to us in our youth. Only horoscopes are not always accurate, and the necessity, when judging a work of art, of including the temporal factor in the sum total of its beauty introduces, to our way of thinking, something as hazardous, and consequently as barren of interest, as every prophecy the non-fulfillment of which will not at all imply any inadequacy on the prophet’s part, for the power to summon possibilities into existence or to exclude them from it is not necessarily within the competence of genius; one may have had genius and yet not have believed in the future of railways or of flight, or, although a brilliant psychologist, in the infidelity of a mistress or of a friend whose treachery persons far less gifted would have foreseen.
Marcel Proust (In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower)
The horoscope loomed in my thoughts. Perhaps it had been right all this time. A marriage that partnered me with death. My wedding, sham though it was, would bring more than just my end. I breathed deeply and a calm spiraled through me. This was my final taste: a helix of air, smacking of burnt things and bright leaves. I pulled the vial from my bangles, fingers shaking. This was my last sight: purling fire and windows that soared out of reach. I raised the vial to my lips. My chest was tight, silk clinging damply to my back, my legs. This was my last sound: the cadence of a heart still beating. “May Gauri live a long life,” I mouthed. The poison trickled thickly from the rim and I tilted my head back, eyes on the verge of shutting-- And then: a shatter. My eyes opened to empty hands clutching nothing. Spilled poison seeped into the rug and shards of glass glinted on the floor, but all of that was obscured by the shadow of a stranger. “There’s no need for that,” said the stranger. He wiped his hands on the front of his charcoal kurta, his face partially obscured by a sable hood studded with small diamonds. All I could see was his tapered jaw, the serpentine curve of his smile and the straight bridge of his nose. Like the suitors, he wore a garland of red flowers. And yet, all of that I could have forgotten. Except his voice… It drilled through the gloaming of my thoughts, pulled at me in the same way the mysterious intruder’s voice had tugged. But where the woman’s voice brought fury, this was different. The hollow inside me shifted, humming a reply in melted song. I could have been verse made flesh or compressed moonlight. Anything other than who I was now. A second passed before I spoke. By then, the stranger’s lips had bent into a grin. “Who are you?” “One of your suitors,” he said, not missing a beat. He adjusted his garland. I backed away, body tensing. I had never seen him before. I knew that with utmost certainty. Did he mean to harm me? “That’s not an answer.” “And that wasn’t a thank you,” he said.
Roshani Chokshi (The Star-Touched Queen (The Star-Touched Queen, #1))
Thank-You Notes Under the vigilant eye of my mother I had to demonstrate my best penmanship By thanking Uncle Gerry for the toy soldiers– Little red members of the Coldstream Guards– And thanking Aunt Helen for the pistol and holster, But now I am writing other notes Alone at a small cherry desk with a breeze coming in an open window, thanking everyone I happen to see on my long walk to the post office today and anyone who ever gave me directions or placed a hand on my shoulder, or cut my hair or fixed my car. And while I am at it, thanks to everyone who happened to die on the same day that I was born. Thank you for stepping aside to make room for me, for giving up you seat, getting out of the way, to be blunt. I waited until midnight on that day in March before I appeared, all slimy and squinting, in order to leave time for enough of the living to drive off a bridge or collapse in a hallway so that I could enter without causing a stir. So I am writing now to thank everyone who drifted off that day like smoke from a row of blown-out candles– for giving up your only flame. One day, I will follow your example and step politely out of the path of an oncoming infant, but not right now with the subtropical sun warming this page and the wind stirring the fronds of the palmettos, and me about to begin another note on my very best stationary to the ones who are making room today for the daily host of babies, descending like bees with their wings and stingers, ready to get busy with all their earthly joys and tasks.
Billy Collins (Horoscopes for the Dead)
The Blue Moon Wish Spell The “Blue Moon” is when there are 2 full moons in one month, it is in the horoscopic symbol of Pisces. To see the dates for the blue moon click here. It illuminates intuition, creativity, and compassion.  This is the time that you should start thinking about all your wishes and intentions. As a practitioner of witchcraft, you should make sure that you perform this ritual since such an astrological opportunity only occurs “once in a Blue Moon”.  Requirements a quartz crystal a cinnamon stick A blue pen a blue candle a sheet of parchment paper 3 safety pins a glass  of spring water or wine A piece silver cord or string, of a length of 24 inches a square of blue cloth Vial of success potion (not mandatory) 1 book of matches On the day before of the Blue Moon, collect all the above items and then set a specific time for performing the spell without any distractions.  Quietly sit down with all your items as listed above and place them before you on a table.  Shut your eyes and bring your mind to silence, after that, concentrate on your breathing.  The moment you feel clear and grounded, you can open your eyes and start the spell. While lighting the candle, think of 3 things that you would like to occur by the year’s end. You can also wish for something that takes place once in a blue moon. (rarely) Pat success oil on your, wrists, temple and your neck for a boost in case you have some. Envision one particular wish coming true while holding the quartz crystal in your hands. Vision yourself doing the thing you are wishing for, or clearly see something that you wish for happen before you. Pick your pen and paper up and start writing down your wishes as you keenly visualize them. Note them down in their order of importance to you.   After you note down the three wishes on your piece of parchment, separately tear them out Attach each of your wishes to the square piece of cloth using a safety pin Place the cinnamon stick in the middle of the cloth and then inwardly fold the sides of the cloth. After that, roll it up. Tightly seal your projections by wrapping the string around the cloth nine times and after that, tie steadily with a knot. Take your wishes and walk outside with them while holding the libation of your choice. Look up to the sky or the moon.  Lift up your glass and say the following words; “On this eve of the Blue Moon, out my intents go. I request they be received, and it is so” Place the cloth containing your wishes in a concealed place where you are the only one who can see it often all the way through the coming few months as a reminder to the wishes you have made.
Edith Yates (Wicca for Beginners: A Guide to Bringing Wiccan Magic,Beliefs and Rituals into Your Daily Life)
The 1º shift was discovered by the Greek astronomer, Hipparchus (190 - 120 BC). He found that the Equinox moved 1º retrograde, or backwards. In other words, 0°Aries once coincided with the actual position of the constellation of Aries on the very first day of Spring. Now this occurs in the Sign of Pisces. Hipparchus realised that the horoscope needed to be anchored somewhere, so he invented the Tropical Zodiac. This means that 0º Aries is permanently anchored in the zodiac at a single point, the day of the Spring Equinox.
Noel Eastwood (Psychological Astrology And The Twelve Houses)
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Psychic Shivanand is a Famous Indian Astrologer in Melbourne specialized for Astrology solutions; Astrologer in Melbourne will help to get rid of all the problems. Indian Astrologer in Melbourne, Spiritual Healer, Black Magic removal specialist in Melbourne. 0416090269 Best Indian Astrologer and Psychic Reader in Melbourne Psychic Shivanand is a prominent Indian astrologer in Melbourne, Australia. Psychic Shivanand is widely recognized as famous and astrology in Melbourne offering services on palm reading, Business Problem Solution, vastu shastra, horoscope readings. He is an expert and has in-depth knowledge in astrology. He owns positive feedback from the customers for his excellence and accurate prediction that people from far and wide coming seeking his services. Best Indian astrologer in Australia He visits different countries all over the world every year and is now residing in Australia to meet his customers in order to solve their problems. Being a Professional Astrologer, the effective palm reading services I offer are second to none. My work is filled with compassion and my readings are exceptionally dependable. I offer a range of services to serve my clients including love line palm reading, best astrologer in Sydney Love Marriage Palmistry and marriage line Palm Reading. Psychic reading and astrology services in Melbourne Psychic Shivanand is a Sanskrit word and oldest traditional Hindu system of astrology, also known as Hindu astrology, Indian astrology Indian astrology, and more recently Vedic astrology. Psychic Shivanand predict daily, monthly and yearly events in one’s life through Vedic astrology to plan your career,No.1 Indian Astrologer Melbourne manage obstacles and use the favorable. Psychic Shivanand provides Astrology Birth Charts to find your planetary position at the time of your birth. Rasi Chart or Birth Chart based on Vedic astrology
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Bianca Jane Taylor. One hundred fifty-seven point forty-eight centimeters tall—or 5’2”. In simple terms, she is tiny. An entire thirty-three point zero two centimeters shorter than me. (6’3”) Twenty-six years old. Taurus. Born on May 5th. (Notably, Children’s Day, Cinco de Mayo, and National Hoagie Day.) She is forty-eight days younger than me. (I am a Pisces. March 18th.) We are an ideal match according to horoscopes. I do not believe in horoscopes.
Camilla Evergreen (Could Have Been Romantic (Could Have Been Sweet #3))
Earlier this morning,' Bukka told him, 'I entertained our great and wise sage, Vidyasagar, the Ocean of Knowledge, and I suggested to him that his masterwork-in-progress, his inquiry into the Sixteen Systems of Philosophy, was reportedly of a brilliance so extraordinary that it would be a tragedy if it ended up incomplete, unfinished, because of the distractions of his work at court. I also took the liberty to mention that astrology was not my personal cup of tea, so that the daily morning horoscope readings demanded by my brother would no longer be required. I must say that on the whole he took it very well. He is a man of infinite grace, and when he let out a single wordless ejaculation—a 'ha!' so loud that it frightened the horses in the stables—I understood this to be part of his transcendent spiritual practice, a controlled exhalation from his body in which he expelled all that was now redundant. A letting-go. After that he took his leave and I believe he has retreated into his original cave of so long ago, near the perimeter of the Mandana complex, to begin a ninety-one-day program of meditation and soul renewal. I know that we will all be grateful for the fruits of this disciplined activity and for the rebirth of his spirit in an even more bountiful incarnation. He is the greatest of us all.' 'You fired him,' Haleya Kote dared to summarize.
Salman Rushdie (Victory City)
That’s Gippy’s natal chart, the horoscope of his birth. Now, in addition to the Sun and Moon, the planets in our solar system, including the one we’re on and starting with the little fellow closest to the Sun, are Mercury, Venus, the Earth, then Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto.
Richard S. Prather (Shell Scott PI Mystery Series, Volume Five)
Saturn is slow and steady while Mars is quick and hasty.
Mitta Xinindlu
Mars is the sender of people to death. Saturn is the receiver of people in death.
Mitta Xinindlu
Never in modern history has a free population simply suppressed discussion of a major issue. As Kevin Myers noted, the people of Britain and Ireland ‘have taken a secret, Self-Denying Ordinance not to discuss immigration or race in any meaningful way’. In living memory barely a newspaper article, radio or television show has seriously questioned the diversity orthodoxy, and even in the intelligent Right-wing press scepticism has had to be couched in such a cryptic way that the paper’s horoscopes are more candid.
Ed West (The Diversity Illusion: What We Got Wrong About Immigration & How to Set It Right)
Neither nature nor history can tell us what we ought to do. Facts, whether those of nature or those of history, cannot make the decision for us, they cannot determine the ends we are going to choose. It is we who introduce purpose and meaning into nature and into history. Men are not equal; but we can decide to fight for equality. Human institutions such as the state are not rational, but we can decide to fight to make them more rational. We ourselves and our ordinary language are, on the whole, emotional rather than rational; but we can try to become a little more rational, and we can train ourselves to use our language as an instrument not of self-expression (as our romantic educationists would say) but of rational communication. History itself I mean the history of power politics, of course, not the non-existent story of the development of mankind has no end nor meaning, but we can decide to give it both. We can make it our fight for the open society and against its antagonists (who, when in a corner, always protest their humanitarian sentiments, in accordance with Pareto's advice) and we can interpret it accordingly. Ultimately, we may say the same about the 'meaning of life'. It is up to us to decide what shall be our purpose in life, to determine our ends. This dualism of facts and decisions is, I believe, fundamental. Facts as such have no meaning; they can gain it only through our decisions. Historicism is only one of many attempts to get over this dualism; it is born of fear, for it shrinks from realizing that we bear the ultimate responsibility even for the standards we choose. But such an attempt seems to me to represent precisely what is usually described as superstition. For it assumes that we can reap where we have not sown; it tries to persuade us that if we merely fall into step with history everything will and must go right, and that no fundamental decision on our part is required; it tries to shift our responsibility on to history, and thereby on to the play of demoniac powers beyond ourselves; it tries to base our actions upon the hidden intentions of these powers, which can be revealed to us only in mystical inspirations and intuitions; and it thus puts these actions and decisions on the moral level of one who, inspired by horoscopes and dreams, chooses his lucky number in a lottery.
Karl Popper (The Open society & its enemies: Vol 2 Hegel & Marx)
Aries Love: Aries: "Love ignites your spirit, Aries. Embrace the passionate flame and chase after the connection that sets your soul on fire.
HoroscopeBuz
Leo Love" Leo: "Your generous heart overflows with love, Leo. Share your radiant warmth and find a partner who basks in your glow.
HoroscopeBuz
Sagittarius Love" Sagittarius: "Love is an adventure, Sagittarius. Embrace the journey with a partner who shares your thirst for exploration.
HoroscopeBuz
My mum always told me that when you know, you know. Your gut would zing, your heart would pitter and you’d feel unified in perfect synchrony. I always thought it was a load of crap, a cheap marketing tactic by horoscope spiritualists to tell you who and who not to date, and if you didn’t feel it, gasp! looks like you’re destined to be forever alone. But in that moment, I felt all three.
Orlagh Birt (Under The Same Sky)
When Saturn is Sextile a partner's Saturn in Synastry, there will be marriage within the first year. By marriage, in today's terms, we also consider being engaged or moving in together.
Mitta Xinindlu
It’s not the horoscope; it’s the hard work with a smart mind that matters
Chintha Sai Bhargav Reddy
these states relate to the progressive age of maturation of a human being. Bala here means ‘child’; a planet in Bala Avastha will have a child-like energy to it, and like a child will not be able to exhibit the full potential of its strength. In fact, a planet in Bala Avastha displays only about one-fourth of the strength that would otherwise be predicted for it. Kumara means ‘youth’ and, like a vigorous youth, a planet in Kumara Avastha gives one-half of its results since, though strength is present, the wisdom needed to direct that strength, which is derived from experience, is usually lacking. Yuva, which also means ‘young’, indicates a young adult who has had sufficient experience to gain some of life’s wisdom. A planet in Yuva Avastha gives full results. Vriddha means ‘aged’ and indicates a planet which has entered its senior, retired years; it gives minimal results. Mrita means ‘dead’; relatively speaking, dead planets produce no results, though every planet does in some way or other give some result. Directional Strength TABLE 4.4 Directional Strength and Weakness of the Planets House Planet’s Strength Planet’s Weakness First (East) Mercury-Jupiter Saturn Fourth (North) Moon Venus Sun Mars Seventh (West) Saturn Jupiter Mercury Tenth (South) Sun Mars Moon Venus A horoscope’s tenth house corresponds to the sector of the heavens that is highest in the sky at any particular moment, while the fourth house corresponds to the sector that is underfoot, i.e. opposite the tenth house below the earth.
Hart Defouw (Light On Life: An Introduction to the Astrology of India (Arkana))
Look to the moon and stars to find the answers that lie within you
HoroscopeBuz
I think we all feel great ambivalence at the sight of our own Horoscope. On the one hand we’re proud to see that the sky is imprinted on our individual life, like a postmark with a date stamped on a letter—this makes it distinct, one of a kind. But at the same time it’s a form of imprisonment in space, like a tattooed prison number. There’s no escaping it. I cannot be someone other than I am. How awful. We’d prefer to think we’re free, able to reinvent ourselves whenever we choose. This connection with something as great and monumental as the sky makes us feel uncomfortable. We’d rather be small, and then our petty little sins would be forgivable.
Olga Tokarczuk (Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead)
My horoscope had said today was going to be the start of a deep, undying love and I had the feeling it had meant my love for this Academy.
Caroline Peckham (Ruthless Fae (Zodiac Academy, #2))
I’m not a man of faith. I don’t read the stars like she does. I don’t believe in horoscopes or fortunes. But there’s no peace unless Lyla is beside me, so that’s got to mean something.
Eva Simmons (Cold Hard Truth (Twisted Roses #3))
Still magic continued, the sort of practical magic that cured and healed and helped both with love desired and love gone wrong. Everyday people had their horoscopes written out and visited fortune-tellers on Miller Street, also known as Mud Avenue after downpours in the spring. There were magical items for sale in many of the markets, often hidden behind the counter or found in a back room or kept under cloths. Most residents did not trust doctors, who were often unschooled and lost more patients than they saved, using worthless remedies: saltpeter, tinctures of distilled powdered human bone used as a cure-all, a false remedy that was called skull moss, a plant grown from the remains of violent criminals who had been hanged which was inserted into a patient’s nostrils and was said to staunch bleeding and stop fainting and fatigue. Folk medicine was far less dangerous than the work of medical doctors. Practitioners of the Nameless Art were held in high regard when it came to their talents and their knowledge of curative tonics, seeds to induce sleep or cure insomnia, packets of dried lavender and rose hips for teas that would calm the nerves.
Alice Hoffman (Magic Lessons (Practical Magic #0.1))
Another day, another confusing as fuck prediction. One day I’d open up my Atlas and the horoscope would say: avoid the eggs today or you’ll get the shits and I’d know exactly where I stood for once.
Caroline Peckham (Shadow Princess (Zodiac Academy, #4))
You’re a star, the brightest one I’ve ever, ever seen. Brighter than the sun and all the other stars combined,” I said. “And I wanna worship you every day and every night and have my fate ruled by you. I want my horoscope defined by you, I want every prediction in my life to be your choice, to rest in your hands.
Caroline Peckham (Feral Wolf (Darkmore Penitentiary, #3))
A square between planets that are friends is nothing to worry about. It simply indicates that partners should be willing to sacrifice and compromise to make the relationship work. It's simply two best friends who are having a disagreement about something and a compromise is required.
Mitta Xinindlu
Knowledge is a burden, Fear is a prison and Truth is the gift of the brave.
Mirna Gabriel (The Gift of Nature (Horoscope (The Observers of the Hour) Book 2))
The horoscope shows the position of the planets at the time of a person’s birth. Astrologers use it to make predictions about the future. This practice is not really in line with the teachings of the Buddha, according to which one’s future is decided by one’s own actions rather than by the stars. Another
Aung San Suu Kyi (Freedom from Fear: And Other Writings)
Once a Leo is committed to a relationship, you are faithful. Should your heart or trust be broken you never forgive or forget. Leos can cut ties, but
Astrology Guide (Horoscope 2017)
For a Leo, when a relationship is over, it is over for good.
Astrology Guide (Horoscope 2017)
What did you ever do to deserve this? In all probability, something terrible.
Amrit Brar
Horoscope: Your happily ever after begins today, as long as you remember there is no such thing as happily ever after.
Penny Reid (Love Hacked (Knitting in the City, #3))
People, says Tarantoga, believe what they want to believe. Take astrology for instance. Astronomers, who after all should know more than anyone about the stars, tell us that they are giant balls of incandescent gas spinning since the world began and that their influence on our fate is considerably less than the influence of a banana peel, on which you can slip and break your leg. But there is no interest in banana peels, whereas serious periodicals include horoscopes and there are even pocket computers you can consult before you invest in the stock market to find out if the stars are favorable. Anyone who says that the skin of a fruit can have more effect on a person’s future than all the planets and stars combined won’t be listened to. An individual comes into the world because his father, say, didn’t withdraw in time, thereby becoming a father. The mother-to-be, seeing what happened, took quinine and jumped from the top of the dresser to the floor but that didn’t help. So the individual is born and he finishes school and works in a store selling suspenders, or in a post office. Then suddenly he learns that that’s not the way it was at all. The planets came into conjunction, the signs of the zodiac arranged themselves carefully into a special pattern, half the sky cooperated with the other half so that he could come into being and stand behind this counter or sit behind this desk. It lifts his spirits. The whole universe revolves around him, and even if things aren’t going well, even if the stars are lined up in such a way that the suspenders manufacturer loses his shirt and the individual consequently loses his job, it’s still more comforting than to know that the stars don’t really give a damn. Knock astrology out of his head, and the belief too that the cactus on his windowsill cares about him, and what is left? Barefoot, naked despair. So says Professor Tarantoga, but I see I am digressing.
Stanisław Lem (Peace on Earth)
You can predict your future life, only predict not assure.
Saad Shah
The Glasshobs built it to keep an eye on the stars, who have a tendency to run off on adventures and forget about how much we down-below folks need to navigate and cast horoscopes and meet lovers on balconies.
Catherynne M. Valente (The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two (Fairyland, #3))
It is all about the trade of ignorance. And India is such a bronze-age nation that is filled with these trades (astrology, palm reading, vastushashtra and others).
Abhijit Naskar (Prescription: Treating India's Soul)
If you are starting a business, or want to ask for a raise, or want to pursue a new career, you can have a Vedic astrologer determine the best time for such actions (muhurtha). You can also receive the best possible date to incorporate or establish a business. I have seen numerous occasions where struggling businesspeople have dissolved a company that was begun at an inauspicious time, and re-established their business with a Vedic astrologer’s help on a much better date, with good results. In fact, the results can be remarkable.
Andrew Bloomfield (How to Practice Vedic Astrology: A Beginner's Guide to Casting Your Horoscope and Predicting Your Future)
ZODIAC SIGNS All the signs of the Zodiac are rooted in the Babylon  system so hated by God.  Believers should avoid anything having to do with such abominations as astrology and horoscope (Deut. 4:19; 18:10; Isa. 47:13).
Pat Holliday (ShapeShifting Children)
Well,” I said pleasantly, “if you know a way to make a database hurry up, I’m sure we’d all love to hear it.” “Goddamn it, you’re not even trying!” she said. I will freely admit that nine times out of ten, I would have had a little more patience with Deborah’s patently impossible request and rotten attitude. But with things as they were lately, I really didn’t want to knuckle my forehead and leap into worshipful compliance. I took a deep breath instead and spoke with audible patience and steely control. “Deborah. I am doing my job the best I can. If you think you can do it better, then please feel free to try.” She ground her teeth even harder, and for a moment I thought the canines might splinter and burst through her cheeks. But happily for her dental bill, they did not. She just glared at me instead, and then nodded her head twice, very hard. “All right,” she said. And then she turned around and walked rapidly away without even looking back at me to snarl one last time. I sighed. Perhaps I should have stayed home in bed, or at least checked my horoscope. Nothing seemed to be going right. The whole world was slightly off-kilter, leaning just a bit out of its normal axis. It had a strange and mean tint to it, too, as if it had sniffed out my fragile mood and was probing for further weakness. Ah,
Jeff Lindsay (Double Dexter (Dexter #6))
For a woman, every outfit is a hopeful spell, cast to influence the outcome of the day. An act of trying to predict your fate, like looking at your horoscope.
Caitlin Moran (How to Be a Woman)
Almost every word in the paper followed the conservative line, and you wouldn’t have been surprised to read in the horoscope that ‘A full moon in July will mean that Geminis will be mugged by the feral children of a heroin-addled single mother.
Nick Cohen (What's Left?: How Liberals Lost Their Way)
The traffic inched along as slowly as ever, but nobody really seemed to mind. I wondered if I should have read my horoscope—perhaps that would explain what was going on. It could well be that somewhere in Miami really knowledgeable people—druids, perhaps—were nodding their heads and murmuring, “Ahhh, Jupiter is in a retrograde moon of Saturn,” and pouring another cup of herb tea while they lounged around in Birkenstocks. Or maybe it was a group of the vampires Debs was chasing—was it called a flock? Perhaps if enough of them sharpened their teeth a new age of harmony would dawn for us all. Or at least for Dr. Lonoff, the dentist. I
Jeff Lindsay (Dexter is Delicious (Dexter, #5))
If you are planning to buy yourself a luxury vehicle, do your homework. Read online customer reviews for the brand you are planning to buy. Talk to a few friends. Do due diligence. Planets are indicating a distinct possibility that you will make a faulty purchase and regret it later.
Suzanne White (2015 Pig New Astrology Horoscopes: Chinese and Western)
Then we have Spiritual practitioners who say we should live out our Horoscope, or Ray Configuration, or Numerology chart. This is not true! To become a true God Realized being it is insightful to know what these influences are, however the great ideal is to transcend your own personal Ray Configuration, Horoscope and Numerology Chart and become an “Integrated God Realized Being!” Why become developed in only one Ray, one Sign of the Zodiac, one House, one Planet, or just a few, when GOD is developed in all of them? To limit yourself to one is develop blind spots to the others. Develop yourself in all areas and you will be successful in all areas! Each of these areas are to develop God Realization in. Do you really want to limit yourself to just one? It is the same thing with Spiritual Paths. Why limit yourself to one! I humbly suggest you might enjoy and benefit more from following a Path of Synthesis where you integrate the best of all Paths and hence benefit from all paths! This will really open your eyes and consciousness! Why limit yourself to one religion when you can study all Religions. All religions lead to GOD! Each is a different lens and will bring different insight! The same is true with Psychology!
Joshua D. Stone (The Golden Book of Melchizedek: How to Become an Integrated Christ/Buddha in This Lifetime Volume 1)