c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
That men would die was a matter of necessity; which men would die, though, was a matter of circumstance, and Yossarian was willing to be the victim of anything but circumstance.
— Joseph Heller
A piano might fall on your head, he said, but it also might not. And in the meantime you never know. Something nice might happen.
— Meg Rosoff, Just in Case
In the meantime, Charlie learnt to fly. Dorothea fell in love. Peter discovered a new star. And a great number of things happened to Justin. Hundreds of millions of ordinary, unexpected, and occasionally quite astonishing things.And that was his fate.
— Meg Rosoff, Just in Case
he imagined fate as a goddess, capricious and fickle, or as a river, which could flood at any moment
— Takashi Hiraide
​One could have mistakenly assumed that each train could choose its own destination. But there was no choice. The Nazi operator sat in the station booth, his hands on levers and switches, forcing each train along its given path.
— Danny M. Cohen, Train
If man could write his own fate, he would have designed his journey to be without obstacles. Yet all obstacles come with valuable lessons designed just for you and only you. Suffering is imposed on us time and again so that one day we would become brave wise masters. That is, a strong being who is confidently aware of their intended direction in life, and fearlessly adding value to the world and their future.
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
Thank you for giving me another chance.""Thank you for deserving one.
— Kiersten White, Illusions of Fate
For a moment, I believed in fate. Such a delicate balance of events had lead to us meeting. It all seemed too much to be a coincidence because I was so delusional in my infatuation. I fell into the trap of my own idea of how things should be.
— Ashley Sarel
I spent so much time thinking about regret. Regret and its accompanying conviction that there is a perfect, placid life, one's own alternate existence, pristine and simple, existing in a neighboring reality in which certain turns in the road were never set upon. And it isn't true. Any of it. I knew that. I had learned it. But it is an irresistible fantasy, if only because it implies we have some control over our fates.
— Robin    Black, Life Drawing
The first verse that comes to mind that refutes all of Calvin’s points is “Whoever calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.” Whoever means whoever. Not just some, not just the elect; that means that anyone who wants to come to God and repent may do so. There is not a certain group that is predestined for hell and they can't do anything about it. How then would God be just? Knowing God’s nature, and that he IS love, I simply cannot believe that and believe it to be a completely false teaching.
— Lisa Bedrick, On Calvinism
The act of living one's own destiny includes a series of stages that are far beyond our understanding, whose objective is always to... make us learn the lessons necessary to fulfill our own destiny.
— Paulo Coelho, The Fifth Mountain
These days, all I ask Fate is that the people she hurls into my life, whether they are evil or good, or morally bipolar, should be amusing to one degree or another.
— Dean Koontz, Brother Odd
... but as with so may diagnoses it is, in the end, the symptoms that matter, not the cause, because this is what being alive means, this is what being a person means, to be sickened by an illness known as you.
— Heidi Julavits, The Vanishers
...maybe that's why this all went wrong. Like fate saying 'hey, you rush me so I'll fuck up everything for you guys.
— Kat T. Masen, Into the Light
There is no fate, only free will, and we were just in the way of other people's free will when they decided to do the Devil's work.
— Dean Koontz, The City
If you achieve good results using a poor method, isn't that a much greater achievement than starting from better methods. - Rider
— Gen Urobuchi 虚淵 玄
It was that evening, when my mother abdicated her authority, that marked the beginning, along with the slow death of my grandmother, of the decline of my will and of my health. Everything had been decided at the moment when, unable to bear the idea of waiting until the next day to set my lips on my mother's face, I had made my resolution, jumped out of bed, and gone, in my nightshirt, to stay by the window through which the moonlight came, until I heard M. Swann go. My parents having gone with him, I heard the garden gate open, the bell ring, the gate close again...
— Marcel Proust, Time Regained
It won't do to be afraid of failure. Failure is the mother of success
—  a long journey begins from the ground beneath his feet.
Do you know something? I've got this funny feeling fate arranged for you to enter my life for the express purpose of tormenting me.
— Lindsay Armstrong, The Seduction Stakes
If you achieve good results using a poor method, isn't that a much greater achievement than starting from better methods.
— Gen Urobuchi 虚淵 玄
You don’t fuck with fate, Oz, because she’ll ass-rape you with no lube, wearing a spiked dildo.
— Katrina Monroe, Reaper
When dreams come true, you won't realize unless they were dreams of bad fate.
— Auliq Ice
How much better it would be, she thinks, if the world were ruled by chance and not a God.
— Jenny Erpenbeck
But something-luck, fate, conspiracy, whatever you want to call it-has thrown us together." He leaned forward, his gaze never leaving her face. "Of all the crazy places in the world, here we are, at the same table, in the same dirty Vietnamese cafe. And..." He paused, his brown eyes warm, his crooked smile a fleeting glimmer in his seriousness. "I'm beginning to think it's time we gave in and followed this crazy script. Time we followed our instincts.
— Tess Gerritsen
The universe doesn't hand out blank cards to play. You will know your hand soon enough.
— Shelly Crane, Undeniably Chosen
As lines, so loves oblique may well Themselves in every angle greet; But ours so truly parallel, Though infinite, can never meet. Therefore the love which us doth bind, But Fate so enviously debars, Is the conjunction of the mind, And opposition of the stars.
— Andrew Marvell, The Complete Poems
The problem with Fate is that no matter how many times you call out to her, she has her own timing that’s irrelevant to whatever anyone else happens to be doing
— Amy Neftzger, The Ferryman
Fearlessness is better than a faint heart for any man who puts his nose out of doors. The length of my life and the day of my death were fated long ago.
— Kevin Crossley-Holland
If we were always given a choice as to every path presented us in life, a multitude of roads leading to priceless treasures would forever go untraveled.Be grateful for your adversities. From toil and triumph evolves a life worth li
— Richelle E. Goodrich
For Fate/ The willing leads, the unwilling drags along.
— Seneca, Letters from a Stoic
Because change creates opportunity, when we do it through purpose and awareness, we are working with the fates, and in turn they smile upon us.
— Lawren Leo, Dragonflame: Tap Into Your Reservoir of Power Using Talismans, Manifestation, and Visualization
Do you believe that evil and tragedy are always planned? You don’t think Fortune has anything to do with it?
— Amy Neftzger, The Ferryman
I've been coerced into free will.
— Brian Spellman, Cartoonist's Book Camp
This is the tragedy of knowing my fate: I have seen how it ends, and I will walk right into it, and nothing will change.
— Kiersten White, Perfect Lies
Who am I to say that these things might nit be forever? Who is Peter Van Houten to assert as fact the conjecture that our labor is temporary?
— John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
Lately, I've become sort of a fatalist. Well, that was bound to happen.
— Alex Bosworth, Chip Chip Chaw!
The boy was beginning to understand that intuition is really a sudden immersion of the soul into the universal current of life, where the histories of all people are connected, and we are able to know everything, because it's all written there.
The fate of all things cherished and expensive, to be lost at hazard, and well before their time
— Stephanie Barron
Harm is the norm. Doom should not jam.
Human Prejudice is Dark Fate's favourite friend
— Prabhukrishna M
Once upon a time, there was a man as great as the gods…But even the great can tremble with fear.Even the great can fall
— Mary E. Pearson, The Kiss of Deception
Life is made of connections. Who knows why fate throws things in our direction, but one thing's for sure, new things are there to offer value to our lives and teach us something new about ourselves. It's what makes life exciting.
— Serina Hartwell
What we expect rarely occurs
—  what we don't expect is what happens.
Everywhere man blames nature and fate, yet his fate is mostly but the echo of his character and passions, his mistakes and weaknesses.
— Democritus
Fate and character are different names for the same idea.
— Hermann Hesse, Demian. Die Geschichte von Emil Sinclairs Jugend
Soon you shall be landing In the battleground, ensure you have the right weapons to fight the enemy; ensure you know your enemy and what he is capable of; take them unprepared to gain the victory and stand with your head held high; show it to the world the cause you have been fighting for, deception is the key, challenge your enemy when it is least expected; break them mentally before breaking them physically. You are a soldier; your enemy is a soldier and you are facing the best, both sides have a lot of similarities only variation lies in the cause. Cause is driver for the battle; cause is binding comrades together and even if the victory is gained the cause stays undefeated. You stand defeated for your strategy, tactics and leaders but never for the cause, it’s still alive, it shall always be alive with the men who have sacrificed their lives, with the men who are still alive. They stand defeated with the physical strength but not for the cause they have believed in and you can never take it away from them. Fight for a cause and you shall stay invincible.A war story is always biased towards one side and it’s hard to narrate a true war story. We choose and make our heroes from what we have read, heard and believed in. If we know the cause both sides are standing for, it will become difficult to take sides. Always respect your enemy, respect for the fact they are standing neck to neck with you, respect them for the courage they have shown to defend the other side, their land, respect them for whatever you have earned the respect for from your men, from your country and from your people.Powerful strategies, tactics, weapons, leaders are allies to the war, they support but never claims victory all my themselves Greatest wars won always had the greater cause. Rebel without a cause is never a rebel just an aimless person whose fate lies in the defeat.
— Pushpa Rana, Just the Way I Feel
I spent the afternoon musing on Life. If you come to think of it, what a queer thing Life is! So unlike anything else, don't you know, if you see what I mean. At any moment you may be strolling peacefully along, and all the time Life's waiting around the corner to fetch you one. You can't tell when you may be going to get it. It's all dashed puzzling. Here was poor old George, as well-meaning a fellow as every stepped, getting swatted all over the ring by the hand of Fate. Why? That's what I asked myself. Just Life, don't you know. That's all there was about it.
— P.G. Wodehouse, My Man Jeeves
But you are involved in the world, and your actions have consequences for other people, and if you don't recognize that, then that's the supreme kind of cruelty. Everyone shares someone else's fate to some extent.
— Malcolm Bradbury, Eating People is Wrong
When an orphan is depressed," wrote Wilbur Larch, "he is attracted to telling lies. A lie is at least a vigorous enterprise, it keeps you on your toes by making you suddenly responsible for what happens because of it. You must be alert to lie, and stay alert to keep your lie a secret. Orphans are not the masters of their fates; they are the last to believe you if you tell them that other people are also not in charge of theirs. When you lie, it makes you feel in charge of your life. Telling lies is very seductive to orphans. I know," Dr. Larch wrote. "I know because I tell them, too. I love to lie. When you lie, you feel as if you have cheated fate--your own, and everybody else's.
— John Irving, The Cider House Rules
No matter how careful we are, if we live long enough, eventually one of us will die. It is not a happy thought, but it is the truth. Such is the way of the world.
— Christopher Paolini, Brisingr
If there is one thing I can promise, that I can guarantee, it is not that I can protect my other allies from the same fate as Sage, it is not that I will not lose battles in the war, it is not that there will be times that will try my determination, it is this: I am the Pauraque’s rival. And I shall be the one to watch her fall.
— Hannah E. O'Neal, the Pauraque's Game
RELIGION OR COUNTRYOur allegiance may determine the fate of others
— Kamil Ali, Profound Vers-A-Tales
You know," she murmured, "we're all heading straight to hell.""Yes," said Masako, giving her a bleak look. "It's like riding downhill with no brakes.""You mean, there's no way to stop?" "No, you stop all right - when you crash.
— Natsuo Kirino, Out
Night had fallen, and Diane admired the deep sky behind Steve's calm countenance. They looked into each other's eyes again and felt the spark and excitement of discovery. As if to celebrate the perfect, life-enabling distance of the earth from the sun, Diane and Steve kissed again.""-The Grand Unified Story (a Short Story) from Stories and Scripts: an Anthology
— Zack Love, Stories and Scripts: an Anthology
Oh no. I'm not gonna let you leave yet. I'm gonna show you the value of takin' your time to get to work. I probably should have done this a long time ago.
— Zack Love, The Doorman
Tis Fate that flings the dice,And as she flingsOf kings makes peasants,And of peasants kings.
— John Dryden
Clinical, brilliantly medical-minded Adam believes in fate. A fate with Fia.
— Kiersten White, Perfect Lies
Strange how reluctant I was to acknowledge that control of my fate lay beyond my own conscious will. Habit of a lifetime, I suppose.
— Patrick McGrath, The Grotesque
Fate. Now that's a loaded word. Like "yoga" or "karma", it's one of those words that slipped out of its native culture and ended up a celebrity with an extreme makeover.
— Debra Ollivier, What French Women Know  About Love, Sex and Other Matters of the Heart and Mind
This is just your unwritten life. You didn’t expect it, it just happened.
— Amy Shannon, Unwritten Life
What once was had, forever lost; thy fate is destined, thy love star-crossed.
— Nenia Campbell, Touched with Sight
In one timeless instant a complex impression, not of knowledge but of feeling, penetrated her awareness like an indelible dream. An imprint of evil and a preponderance of good, both crying that somehow it was meant to be. Then nothing, only the cold apathy of deepest space.
— Marcha A. Fox, Beyond the Hidden Sky
To be a Russian writer at the end of the nineteenth century must have meant bearing an inescapably bitter fate. The more they tried to escape from Russia, the more deeply Russia swallowed them.
— Haruki Murakami, 1Q84 BOOK 1
Such sentences always end in silence, no matter how they may begin--indeed, this is the very essence of fate: that which we never quite manage to say.
— Matthew Flaming, The Kingdom of Ohio
History warns us ... that it is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions.
— Thomas Henry Huxley, Collected Essays of Thomas Henry Huxley
When I get this feeling, this compulsion, I always do what it tells me. I can't explain where it comes from or how I get it, and it doesn't happen very often. But I obey it. And this afternoon I had a feeling that I must come over to the haunted house. That's all I know, kid. I'm not holding anything back. Maybe it's because I'm supposed to meet you. You tell me.
— Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time
The single word that directs a person’s fate and ultimately the fates of those she comes in contact with is of course a common subject of entertainments and moralizing stories, but if everyone were to consider all the possible consequences of all one’s possible choices, no one would move a millimeter, or even dare to breathe for fear of the ultimate results.
— Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice
Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
The control of information makes history.
— duzB August 2010
There is no shortage of fault to be found amidst our stars.
— John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
I have brought you a hero’s fate, and a hero’s fate is never happy. It is never anything but tragic.
— Rick Riordan, The Lightning Thief
The cool thing about getting older, is that you have so much to look back on. If you take the time to reflect on your life journey to where you are now, you will be amazed at how many times “fate” caused you to make great decisions that lead you to where you are now.
— Beth Ramsay, #Networking is people looking for people looking for people
He wondered at times whether he didn’t belong to a class of people secretly convinced they had an arrangement with fate
—  in return for docility or ingenuous good will they were to be shielded from the worst brutalities in life.
He was angry; not as the irritable, from chafing of a trifle; nor was his anger like the fool's, pumped from the wells of nothing, to be dissipated by a reproach or a curse; it was the wrath peculiar to ardent natures rudely awakened by the sudden annihilation of a hope --dream, if you will-- in which the choicest happinesses were thought to be certainly in reach. In such case nothing intermediate will carry off the passion --the quarrel is with Fate.
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ
...a world where a sparrow's fate and that of a man can be decided in the blink of a cat's eye, such is the true measure of time.
— Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone
There is not shortage of fault to be found amidst our stars.
— John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
And he knew he would not be travelling home. If he had to wear a donkey jacket and wait for fifty years, then he would wait. At last there was a place in the world where he had reason to be, a place that had meaning. For days, without realising it, he had sensed this meaning everywhere, in the streets, houses, ruins and temples of Rome. It could not be said of the feeling that it was 'filled with pleasurable expectation'. Rome and its millennia were not by nature associated with happiness, and what Mihály anticipated from the future was not what is usually conjured up by 'pleasurable expectation'. He was awaiting his fate, the logical, appropriately Roman, ending.
— Antal Szerb, Journey by Moonlight
Maybe I'm wrong
—  I might not believe in fate but I do believe in causality and who's to say fate isn't just a sort of social mathematics that brings like-minded people together.
Synchronicity, it is like a collaboration with fate. All of that becomes the norm when the EGO (edge God out) is no longer the driving force in your life.
— Wayne W. Dyer, The Shift: Taking Your Life from Ambition to Meaning
What's the world's greatest lie?' the boy asked, completely surprised.'It's this: that at a certain point in our lives, we lose control of what's happening to us, and our lives become controlled by fate. That's the world's greatest lie.
— Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
There is a string that connects us that is not visible to the eye. Maybe every person has more than one soul they are connected to, and all over the world there are these invisible strings. Maybe the chances that you'll find each and every one of your soulmates is slim. But sometimes you're lucky enough to stumble across one. And you feel a tug. And it's not so much a choice to love them through their flaws and through your differences, but rather you love them without even trying. You love their flaws.
— Tarryn Fisher, Mud Vein
I believe in times of adversity there’s a line that is sometimes drawn, a line that separates your old life from your new. You cross the line, you’ll never be the same.
— Kresley Cole, A Hunger Like No Other
What you may seek and what you may find are not always one.
— Lloyd Alexander, The High King
Maybe he was overwhelmed, like I am overwhelmed, by that mysterious intersection where love meets luck, where fate meets will. Because he'd been waiting for her. And there she was.
— Gayle Forman, Just One Year
Fate never promises to tell you everything up front. You aren't always shown the path in life you're supposed to take. But sometimes when you're really lucky, you meet someone with a map.
— Sarah Addison Allen, The Peach Keeper
No matter how honest scientists think they are, they are still influenced by various unconscious assumptions that prevent them from attaining true objectivity. Expressed in a sentence, Fort's principle goes something like this: People with a psychological need to believe in marvels are no more prejudiced and gullible than people with a psychological need not to believe in marvels.
— Colin Wilson, Mysteries
Maybe that’s what makes it so hard. When you spend years thinking and dreaming about someone and have them fall back into your life? Sounds like fate to me.
— Codi Gary, Good Girls Don't Date Rock Stars
Things don't happen for a reason, we make reasons out of things that happen.
— Michael P. Naughton, Deathryde: Rebel Without a Corpse
Sometimes even the smallest of efforts can change someone’s fate entirely.
— Mitch Rowland, Eternity's Reach
It does not matter how much we distance ourselves, how far we run - the past always shadows us.
— Jayne Castel, Night Shadows
It is strange how intricately life hangs in the scales, and how unrelated events and single decisions alter the outcomes. Some remote land ten thousand miles from me, some land unfamiliar to me, held the key to my future.
— Sara Niles, Torn From the Inside Out
Life may look to be made up of incredible coincidences. One problem. I don’t believe in coincidences. I believe in twists of fate.
— Tania Elizabeth, The Tier of Eternal Grace: The Souls Cry
Who can ever know what path to walk on when all of them are either crooked or broken? One just has to walk.
— Ishmael Beah, Radiance of Tomorrow
As her fate, she accepted the world of ice, shining, shimmering, dead; she resigned herself to the triumph of glaciers and the death of the world.
— Anna Kavan, Ice
I had wanted to compromise with Fate: to escape occasional great agonies by submitting to a whole life of privation and small pains.
— Charlotte Brontë, Villette
The essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of things.
— Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World
Most people live life on the path we set for them. Too afraid to explore any other. But once in a while people like you come along and knock down all the obstacles we put in your way. People who realize free will is a gift, you'll never know how to use until you fight for it.
— the adjustment bureau
. . . is it better to throw yourself head first and laughing into the holy rage calling your name?
— Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch
I know that I'm doomed and I'm not going to struggle against my fate. I am only writing this down so that when you do not see me any more you will know that my enemy has finally triumphed.
— Anna Kavan, Asylum Piece
What must it be like to have such faith in the world, in plans, in your own ability to control your fate? It was contagious, that's what it was. I could not help it. I caught his hope like a plague.
— Amy Lane, Truth in the Dark
Fate lies in wait like a fucking time bomb, rearranging and aligning the stars to its own satisfaction. Then, one day, it detonates right in your face and all you want to do is not exist. But it’s what you do to dislodge Fate’s teeth from your ass that matters.
— Cecilia Robert
What if our badness and mistakes are the very thing that set our fate and bring us round to good? What if, for some of us, we can't get there any other way?
— Donna Tartt
We're all just marionettes, Ashline," Eve said softly. "Dangling, dancing, waiting. You can pretend like you pull your own strings, but in the end your only hope is that you've landed in the hands of someone who knows what the hell they're doing.
— Karsten Knight, Wildefire
I knew that I was talented. I was positive about that. I wasn’t sure exactly what I was talented at, but I was ambitious enough to wait it out and see what turned up.
— Sara Sheridan, The Pleasure Express
The gods do make playthings of us. But it is we mortals who provide them with tools.
— Melina Marchetta, Finnikin of the Rock
Oh. I get it now. God had Nader beat my ass and my mom leave my dad just so Jodi could learn how to chop onions and use a propane grill. Great. Awesome.
— A.S. King, Everybody Sees the Ants
Sometimes life isn’t what we want, it’s what we get.
— Sara Sheridan, Brighton Belle
If you make a person believe that his misfortune in this birth is due to his sins in his previous birth, he will resign himself to his fate and not vent his fury on society at large.
— Amish Tripathi, The Immortals of Meluha
She had the hard, half-apathetic expression of one who deems anything possible at the hands of time and chance, except perhaps fair play
— Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge
Cathy, don't look so defeated. She was only trying to put us downagain.Maybe nothing did work out right for her, but that doesn't mean we aredoomed. Let's go forth tomorrow with no great expectations of findingperfection. Then, expecting only a small share of happiness, we won'tbe disappointed."If a little hill of happiness would satisfy Chris, good for him. Butafter all these years of striving, hoping, dreaming, longing-I wanted amountain high! A hill wasn't enough. From this day forward, I vowedto myself, I was in control of my life. Not fate, notGod, not even Chris was ever again going to tell me what to do, ordominate me in any way. From this day forward, I was my own person, totake what I would, when I would, and I would answer only to myself. I'dbeen kept prisoner, held captive by greed. I'd been betrayed,deceived, tied to, used, poisoned ... but all that was over now.
— V.C. Andrews, Flowers in the Attic
I thought of the new stone, of my new wife, and of the newly buried white bones beneath us, and I felt that fate had made sport of us all.
— Sōseki Natsume, Kokoro
That bitch fate had a nasty sense of humor.
— Lorelei James, All Jacked Up
From this day forward, I vowedto myself, I was in control of my life. Not fate, notGod, not even Chris was ever again going to tell me what to do, ordominate me in any way. From this day forward, I was my own person, totake what I would, when I would, and I would answer only to myself.
— V.C. Andrews, Flowers in the Attic
I truly wanted to live a life in which I could make my own choices, independent of the 'duties' of my birth and position. It was only when fate granted that to me that I realized the cost of it. I could set aside my responsibilities to others and live my life as I please only when I also severed my ties to them. I could not have it both ways.
— Robin Hobb, Golden Fool
But I despised men who accepted their fate. I shaped mine twenty times and had it broken twenty times in my hands.
— Dorothy Dunnett, The Game of Kings
Francesca was a strong believer in fate. She assumed he picked up the habit from her therapist who was constantly preaching that “everything happened for a reason”, but regardless she now spouted out that philosophy like she was paid to. Everything big in her life, she believed it was all a part of God’s plan – it was all fate. So the way she saw it, it had to be fate that Paul came into her life like this.
— Courtney Carola, Where We Belong
I was told that there was nothing for me but to come here. But, as with life itself, it may not be our choice to come, but it is our choice to leave.
— Katherine Marsh, Jepp, Who Defied the Stars
The world was full of forces you couldn't fight against which suddenly loomed up and aimed a crushing blow at you.
— Tarjei Vesaas, The Birds
We can't change our fate, because we can't change something which doesn't exist.
— Mehmet Murat ildan
The tram’s fate is to travel only on its track. But for man, everywhere is a track; everywhere is his fate!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
There is always a moment in our lives when we are destined to fall the way we ever feared of.
— Annie Ali
Fate is fait accompli
— Messaoud Mohammed
I don't believe in a fate that will fall on us no matter what we do. I do believe in a fate that will fall on us if we do nothing.
— Ronald Reagan
In this game against fate, I am losing. Miserably.
— Leigh Hershkovich, Shattered Illusions
In the first play, the crisis is Thomas More. In the second it’s Anne Boleyn. In the third book, and the third play, it’s crisis every day, an overlapping series of only just negotiable horrors. It’s climbing and climbing. Then a sudden abrupt fall - within days.
— Hilary Mantel
There will be times in which things appear hopeless. You will begin to doubt everything around you. You will even begin to doubt yourself. You will think things will never look up and you may be in the deepest, darkest, loneliest place in the world. Everything which had once been infused with wonder may appear disappointing and harsh. You may grow cynical and come to believe that this is simply the way the world is...that one must bear with the unforgiving realities of the world and only hope that it doesn’t get worse. You might grow suspicious of others, as adults tend to do, and close yourself off from the rest of the world. You might just look to the past and reminisce about better days...or you might just dwell in one place for a little too long and become nostalgic for the future. Just remember—regardless of where you are, what experiences you have, and who you have become—that there will always be those who have loved you. Those whom you may have taken for granted, but have nonetheless, always had you in their hearts and in their hopes and wishes. Lives that you have touched: whether you realize it or not. To separation you may venture, but indissolubly in union shall you drift...you will always be at the whims of forces, both great and small, and far beyond your capacity to control. That’s how all our stories go. Innumerable arcs intersect and scatter into a vast indefinite sea.
— Ashim Shanker, Don't Forget to Breathe
Sometimes I think things happen for a reason... And I think if we're meant to run into each other again, fate will make it happen.
— Lauren Blakely, The Start of Us
What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.
— Henry David Thoreau, Walden
There are things which cannot be carried through even with the good will of everybody concerned
— Karen Blixen, Out of Africa
The line of head is strong, but the line of heart is weak. And most importantly, the line of life is short. The stars do not seem to be right.
— Vikas Swarup, Q & A
The universe had an odd sense of fairness; it took away things one did not want to give up, and then gave things one did not ask for.
— Laila Lalami, Secret Son
It is true. Indeed, that is why I dared not speak. I have yearned to be again at the side of my beloved Arianllyn, and my thoughts are with her now. But had I chosen to return, I would ever wonder whether my choice was made through wisdom or following the wishes of my own heart. I see this is as it must be, and the destiny laid upon me. I am content to die here.
— Lloyd Alexander, The Black Cauldron
The only sure thing about luck is that it will change.
— Wilsin Mizner
The long years had taught him that everything worked itself out given enough time, and some things would always be the way fate wished them to be.
— Michelle M. Pillow, The Jaded Hunter
And one day when you wake up, you happen to realise that your battle isn’t with the man you had got into a brawl with the other day, it isn’t with a friend turned foe, it isn’t with those parents who chose to give up on you, it isn’t with the bus driver for not having waited until you got in, it isn’t with the employer who cancelled the application to your leave, it isn’t with the examiner who resolved into failing you, it isn’t with the woman who did not reciprocate your feelings, it isn’t with child who dropped his ice-cream cone on you, it isn’t with your ill fate and it isn’t with that superior being above you. Your battle, your fight isn’t against the world but against yourself and the only way to come through all of it and beyond, to win, is improvement, self-improvement which needs to be gradual and progressive with the transverse of each day.
— Chirag Tulsiani
Fate would have no divinity if we were wise: it is we who make her a goddess and place her in heaven.
— Juvenal
You can only control so much, in the end the rest is up to fate.
— Ziad K. Abdelnour, Economic Warfare: Secrets of Wealth Creation in the Age of Welfare Politics
We were discussing the fine puppetry of fate.
— Sarah MacLean, No Good Duke Goes Unpunished
The concept of Free Will makes no sense unless associated, somehow or the other, with Absolute Determinism; it is just as a man cannot walk without gravity arresting and spurring his pace simultaneously.
— Raheel Farooq
There’s no such thing as fate. It’s just the word men give to decisions which have worked out badly.
— Kim   Wright, City of Silence
Fate drives cruel bargains. We must always release one thing before we can grasp something else.
— Kim   Wright, City of Light
Fate! This four-letter little word gave the biggest harm to mankind! We must totally get rid of this degrading concept of primitiveness!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Your work is your destiny.
— Md. Mujib Ullah
Sometimes fate or life or whatever you want to call it, leaves a door a little open and you walk through it. But sometimes it locks the door and you have to find the key, or pick the lock, or knock the damn thing down. And sometimes, it doesn’t even show you the door, and you have to build it yourself.
— Gayle Forman, Just One Year
Every step you take, a million doors open in front of you like poppies; your next step closes them, and another million bloom. You get on a train, you pick up a lamp, you speak, you don’t. What decides why one thing gets picked to be the way it will be? Accident? Fate? Some weakness in ourselves? Forget your harps, your tin-foil angels—the only heaven worth having would be the heaven of answers.
— Mark Slouka, Brewster
It's up to you, not fate.
— David Levithan, Dash & Lily's Book of Dares
Our actions are the results of our intentions and our intelligence.
— E. Stanley Jones
I am Frustration. I am Memory-Lost. Sometimes I read a line a dozen times before it sticks. My creative force has slipped. I type slower, speak slower, think at a snail’s pace. I’m Life shapeshifted by Post Traumatic Stress, bastardized by Fate.
— Chila Woychik, On Being a Rat and Other Observations
I think we're all aiming to be something better than what everyone thinks we were born to be
— Chris Kurtz, The Adventures of a South Pole Pig: A novel of snow and courage
And here she was, an old woman now, living and hoping, keeping faith, afraid of evil, full of anxiety for the living and an equal concern for the dead; here she was, looking at the ruins of her home, admiring the spring sky without knowing that she was admiring it, wondering why the future of those she loved was so obscure and the past so full of mistakes, not realizing that this very obscurity and unhappiness concealed a strange hope and clarity, not realizing that in the depths of her soul she already knew the meaning of both her own life and the lives of her nearest and dearest, not realizing that even though neither she herself nor any of them could tell what was in store, even though they all knew only too well that at times like these no man can forge his own happiness and that fate alone has the power to pardon and chastise, to raise up to glory and to plunge into need, to reduce a man to labour- camp dust, nevertheless neither fate, nor history, nor the anger of the State, nor the glory or infamy of battle has any power to affect those who call themselves human beings. No, whatever life holds in store – hard-won glory, poverty and despair, or death in a labour camp – they will live as human beings and die as human beings, the same as those who have already perished; and in this alone lies man's eternal and bitter victory over all the grandiose and inhuman forces that ever have been or will be.
— Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate
I can't believe what a state I got myself into over this. Everyone was right. They said it would just happen, and it did. I guess the best things do.
— Nora Roberts, Jewels of the Sun
You'll never make it out there. You weren't made for South Pole adventures." Flora gave her an icy look. "I think I know by now what I was made for.
— Chris Kurtz, The Adventures of a South Pole Pig: A novel of snow and courage
How do you change the inevitable? The act of trying to change it could actually cause it to happen.
— Travis Luedke, The Shepherd
I was hoping to find a way out of here and instead found you.
— Nicki Elson, Hans & Greta: a Twisted Fairy Tale Novella
Struggling alone, like the everyday and ending with the same fate.
— M.F. Moonzajer, A moment with God ; Poetry
I freely will the best choice, thus willing the same will
— serge jerkezian
Against FateHey, Fate! When you fail a man, you spendall your time digging a well to trap him.Then you untie the well's wheel rope so that it can roll.And you keep the poor mortal struggling up, only to fall back.You show him a bushel of means and say"This is it. Worry about it, and dream."Meanwhile you spin the wheel of fortune and fill the house of the wicked with jewels,while you force the just and scrupulousto sweep up the pieces.And the man who should not even tend pigsrides a horse as a cavalier.And without a shovel, you scoop ruin onto the houseof the honorable and the just.Fate, if I speak evil of you, you'll claimthe man is jealous and confusedBut why do you look crossly at the learnedand make the ignorant the landlord?Hey, why toss the bread of the wiseso far down the valley?And why should I believe in your justiceWhen you don't serve it to anyone important?Not that you keep either oath or bargain, treacherous one.Whomever you love today and who is raised to a golden throne,tomorrow may be sitting in ashes.How can such a fraudulent judge make a just decision?Fate, friend of the deceitful and devious, you are harsh to the honest.What more can I say except that someday I expectyou to mix up sky and earth and sea.
— Frik
I’ve found I still serve a purpose. I remind people to pray, to calculate the odds, to thank the fates, the gods, good karma, whatever it was that made this happen to me and not them. I’m in the worst sort of club. The one no one else wants to be in.
— Tracy Guzeman, The Gravity of Birds
The powe if fate is something terrible. It cannot be escaped--not with wealth or by war, not with a tower ir a sea-lashed black ship.
— Sophocles, Antigone
No one's fate is of any interest to you except your own.
— Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita
Come in, Bean." Come in Julian Delphiki, longed-for child of good and loving parents. Come in, kidnapped child, hostage of fate. Come and talk to the Fates, who are playing such clever little games with your life.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender's Shadow
Every part of life changes with every breath we take. If you don’t like where your story is headin’, you fight your fate with everything you have.
— Jessica Fortunato, Sacrifice
I spoke of the tragic illusion of perpetuity, but, no, my friends, it is a comic one. The ludicrous plot in which we are all trapped. The ancient Greeks referred to plot as mythos, attributing the random drift of human affairs to some sort of unknowable but glimpsable divine motion, attempting to attach a certain grandeur to it, the delusion of meaning. But we are characters who do not exist, in a story composed by no one from nothing. Can anything be more pitiable? No wonder we all are grieving.
— Robert Coover
Predictability is not how things will go, but how they can go.
— Raheel Farooq
When forces of nature are involved, fate gets all the blame.
— Maxine Clair, October Suite
Fate is a fickle bitch. Just when you believe you've secured the goose that lays the golden egg, she back heels you in the bollocks.
— Ken Scott, Jack of Hearts
The myriad choices of his fateSet themselves out upon a plateFor him to chooseWhat had he to lose
— Lou Reed
I don't have any relationship with God and I've never wanted it. I don't believe in fate or in any superior entity; if a plane crashes and people die, it's not because Heaven said so.
— Fernando Alonso Díaz
What we know that we know forms our intellect
—  what we know that we do not know makes our faith
It's a breath you took too late.It's a death that's worse than fate.
— Elvis Costello
Some necrophobes earn their own fates.
— David S.E. Zapanta, Posthumous
We don't have to know everything. If you believe in fate and some kind of meaning and sense in this fucked-up world, then believe with abandon, love. Enjoy it.
— Jessica Park, Left Drowning
Fate had a weird way of circling back over paths that were meant to cross.
— Gail McHugh, Pulse
What did you see when you died?" He has that tenative half smile, like he's almost embarrassed by what he's saying. "Because I'm guessing it wasn't the Sea of Tranquility."And when I look at him, I'm not so sure it wasn't.“Where did you go?" His voice drops just slightly and loses even the suggestion of a smile.He's watching me like he's not sure he's allowed to ask the question, and he's not even sure he wants the answer. I can almost see his grandfather's words and Josh's doubts about them swimming in his head. On every side of me are the lights and the tools and the wood and the boots and the boy I want to see forever. And if the my Sea of Tranquility were real, it would be this place, here, with him.I don't say anything right away, because I just want one minute to look at his face before I give him my last secret.And then I tell him."Your garage.
— Katja Millay, The Sea of Tranquility
Fate is a funny thing, isn’t it?
— Winna Efendi, Melbourne: Rewind
The hands of fate keep time on a heart-shaped clock.
— Darren Shan, The Vampire Prince
Who was more conscious than the soldier of capricious fortune, of the random roll of the dice?
— Robert Galbraith, The Cuckoo's Calling
Fate has her golden sons, and her bastards.
— Jennifer Mardoll, The Sarrington Estate
Follow your fate, and be satisfied with it, and be glad not to be a second-hand motor salesman, or a yellow-press journalist, pickled in gin and nicotine, or a cripple - or dead.
— Ian Fleming, From Russia With Love
Whatever fate ordains, danger or hurt, or death predetermined, nothing can avert.
— Theognis
In the centre of Bond was a hurricane-room, the kind of citadel found in old-fashioned houses in the tropics. These rooms are small, strongly built cells in the heart of the house, in the middle of the ground floor and sometimes dug down into its foundations. To this cell the owner and his family retire if the storm threatens to destroy the house, and they stay there until the danger is past. Bond went to his hurricane room only when the situation was beyond his control and no other possible action could be taken. Now he retired to this citadel, closed his mind to the hell of noise and violent movement, and focused on a single stitch in the back of the seat in front of him, waiting with slackened nerves for whatever fate had decided for B. E. A. Flight No. 130.
— Ian Fleming, From Russia With Love
Life is stranger than any of us expected,There is a somber, imponderable fate.Enigma rules, and the heart has no certainty.
— Richard Eberhart, Selected Poems, 1930-1965
But doctor, even you, a Hittite, saw what our Mycenaean shields were like! Oh, don’t smile, I may be an old woman, but I known what I am talking about, and if you will be patient, you will understand, too… You do not see the wholeness of things, the Virtue, the arête. You observe one fact, the single symptom, like the Hittite doctor you are, but your eyes are blind to the Ananke, the whole Order of things which even the gods cannot infringe. The shield is formed on a frame, and that frame is the will of man. But after the sun and rain have been on it a week, its shape has changed beyond man’s guiding; and that is Ananke… though I began upon a firm frame, the hide of my experience has tautened and twisted until now I am as Ananke will me to be. I am not what I wished, or others wished for me: I am what it was ordained for me to become ever the seed passed from my father to my mother. I am the cow’s hide, tormented to the only shape it can be. Now do you see? Do you see that there may be no anger, no regret, no remorse?
— Henry Treece, Electra
He who believes in the fate accepts the collar in his neck!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Making plans is a game. Life chooses for you.
— Anita Diamant, Day After Night
To stand up for someone was to stitch your fate into the lining of theirs.
— Tom Rob Smith, Child 44
And here he was, a little halfling from the Shire, a simple hobbit of the quiet countryside, expected to find a way where the great ones could not go, or dared not go. It was an evil fate.
— J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers
Our destination isn't clear. All I know is that I want to get there together. The Unknown is scary. I'll always have some fear about what's going to happen next. The thing is, the unknown can also be exciting. Your life could change in an instant anytime. But sometimes, that change is the best thing that will ever happen to you. Maybe I dont' have to know what my fate is to know that everything will be okay. Maybe the not knowing is how we move forward. Wherever I'm headed, I know it's exactly where I'm supposed to be.
— Susane Colasanti, Something Like Fate
Don't ever say you are sorry for "being caught in the moment". Because, at that moment, that is EXACTLY where you wanted to be.
— Cody W
Maybe fate's arithmetic is so diffuse that it's not arithmetic at all.
— David Levithan, How They Met, and Other Stories
So you see, we are not free to choose our fate. There is a yoke to be borne and freedom is only an illusion. I am not free. God has put me here on earth for a reason.
— Naomi Ragen, Jephte's Daughter
Some things you cannot stop happening.
— Christie Watson, Tiny Sunbirds, Far Away
..What our contempt often hurls from us,We wish it our again; the present pleasure,By revolution lowering,does becomeThe opposite of itself..
— William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra
We can't change what is coming. Something is always coming.
— Sarah Blake, The Postmistress
The fates lead her who will
—  who won't they drag.
Thus the 'fortune-teller' is trying to foresee something that is really quite unforeseeable. This is characteristic of all forms of foreseeing. And precisely because what they 'see' is so vague, it is hard to repudiate fortune-tellers' claims.
— Jostein Gaarder, Sophie's World
She loved him, and she was going to do everything she could to get him back. She hadn’t come this far just to walk away. He was the love of her life, dammit. The man she wanted to marry. The world had reversed its orbit to bring them back together, for Pete’s sake, and she wasn’t going down without a fight. Fate could only do so much; the rest was up to her.
— Andrea Lochen, The Repeat Year