c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
We might not know we are seeking people who best enrich our lives, but somehow on a deep subconscious level we absolutely are. Whether the bond is temporary or permanent, whether it succeeds or fails, fate is simply a configuration of choices that combine with others to shape the relationships that surround us. We cannot choose our family, but we can choose our friends, and we sometimes, before we even meet them.
— Simon Pegg, Nerd Do Well
Grappling with fate is like meeting an expert wrestler: to escape, you have to accept the fall when you are thrown. The only thing that counts is whether you get back up.
— Ming-Dao Deng, Everyday Tao: Living with Balance and Harmony
In time you shall see Fate approach youIn the shape of your own image in the mirror.
— Edgar Lee Masters, Spoon River Anthology
Fate's arrow, when expected, travels slow.
— Dante Alighieri, Paradiso
Perhaps fate brought us together,And the incidents in between made us close,Falling in love was a simple choice,But breaking my heart, that was yours.
— Tanzy Sayadi, Write like no one is reading 2
I am on my way, and tell him he better watch his ass!” Jack shouted, and I held the phone away from ear so it wouldn’t damage my eardrums. “Real mature, Jack,” Peter scoffed
— Amanda Hocking, My Blood Approves
No voice comes from outer space, from the folds of dust and carpets of wind to tell us that this is the way it was meant to happen, that if only we knew how long the ruins would last we would never complain.
— Mark Strand, Blizzard of One
One minute you've got a lucky star watching over you and the next instant it's done a bunk.
— Salman Rushdie
If everything were anything," Chance said softly, "the barriers would break down, and we'd all lose ourselves to chaos. And then there would be no cotton candy.
— Jordan Castillo Price, Immortal Coil
I'm sorry I started all this by trying to fly and I'd take it back if I could but I can't, so please think of it from my point of view: if you die I will have a dead brother and it will be me instead of you who suffers.Justin thought of his brother on that warm summer day, standing up on the windowsill holding both their futures, light and changeable as air, in his outstretched arms.Of course, Justin thought, I'm part of his fate just as he's part of mine. I hadn't considered it from his point of view. Or from the point of view of the universe, either. It's just a playing field crammed full of cause and effect, billions of dominoes, each knocking over billions more, setting off trillions of actions every second. A butterfly flaps its wings in Africa and my brother in Luton thinks he can fly.The child nodded. 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
Those whom heaven helps we call the sons of heaven. They do not learn this by learning. They do not work it by working. They do not reason it by using reason. To let understanding stop at what cannot be understood is a high attainment. Those who cannot do it will be destroyed on the lathe of heaven. —Chuang Tse: XXIII
— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
You want to know what I believe? I believe in fate, but I also believe in free will. Meaning, there's a path, but we're free to veer away from it. The only problem is that there's no way to know whose path we're following on any given moment. Our own? Our fate's? Other people are on their on paths, too. What happens when we intersect? What happens when someone else wipes our path clean, and we're left with no road to follow? Is that fate? Is that when free will kicks in? Is the path there, but invisible?Who the hell knows?
— Brigid Kemmerer, Letters to the Lost
Plainly it isn't an exact science, despite it being a complex interaction of micro-decisions and corresponding thought; perhaps it doesn't always work and we pass by some potential soulmates like the proverbial ships in the night, never quite connecting. Then again, perhaps the system is tenacious and continues to run like a computer program on infinite loop, so that if at first you don't meet, you are drawn back together for another try.
— Simon Pegg, Nerd Do Well
If there is no fate and our interactions depend on such a complex system of chance encounters, what potentially important connections do we fail to make? What life changing relationships or passionate and lasting love affairs are lost to chance?
— Simon Pegg, Nerd Do Well
The inevitable is no less a shock just because it is inevitable.
— Jamaica Kincaid, The Autobiography of My Mother
Words of the hero: "I am my fate.
— Marty Rubin
Damn you to Lolth's web!" he said. "Don't you dare pretend if doesn't matter to you!" "Why do you care?" Drizzt growled back at him. "No one who has ever made a difference?" "Do you believe that?" "What do you want from me, son of Baenre?" "Just the truth-your truth. You believe that you have never made a difference?" "Perhaps there is no difference to be made," Drizzt replied. "Do not ever say that," Jarlaxle said to him. "Why do you care?" Drizzzt asked. "Because you were the one who escaped," Jarlaxle replied. "Don't you understand? Jarlaxle went on. "I watched you-we all watched you. Whenever a matron mother, or almost any female of Menzoberranzan was about, we spoke your name with vitriol, promising to avenge Lolth and kill you." "But whenever they were not around, the name of Drizzt Do'Urden was spoken with jealousy, often reverence. You do not understand, do you? You don't even recognize the difference you've made to so many of us in Menzoberranzan." "How? Why?" "Because you were the one who escaped!" "You are here with me!" Drizzt argued. "Are you bound to the City of Spiders by anything more than your own designs? By Bregan D'Aerthe?" "I'm not talking about the city, you obstinate fool," Jarlaxle replied, his voice lowering. Again Drizzt looked at him, at a loss. "The heritage," Jarlaxle explained. "The fate.
— R.A. Salvatore, Gauntlgrym
Life is full of alternatives but no choice.
— Patrick White, The Aunt's Story
It is a shame for anyoneto be well-known for righteousness.It is a great disgrace to feeldistress at the injustice of the turning of the wheels of fate.
— Omar Khayyám, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
What connexion can there be, between the place in Lincolnshire, the house in town, the Mercury in powder, and the whereabout of Jo the outlaw with the broom, who had that distant ray of light upon him when he swept the churchyard-step? What connexion can there have been between many people in the innumerable histories of this world, who, from opposite sides of great gulfs, have, nevertheless, been very curiously brought together!
— Charles Dickens, Bleak House
It troubles him to consider the powerful currents and fine-tuning that alter fate, the close and distant influences, the accidents of character and circumstance.
— Ian McEwan, Saturday
Life has a way of kicking one along like a football, or so I've found. Fate had never dealt me personally a particularly easy time, but that was OK, that was normal. Most people, it seemed to me, took their turn to be football. Most survived. Some didn't.
— Dick Francis, Straight
If I'd been a cowboy, it might've ended well.Somewhere on the ramble, I'm sure I'd have to sellMy guns along the highway. My coins to the table To make a gambler's double, I'd double debts to pay.Prob'ly shrink and slink away, It mightn't've ended well.What If I'd been a sailor? I think it might've ended well.From August to MayFor a searat of man drifting through eternal blue, aboard the finest Debris.I might've called the shanties. From daybreak to storm's set, lines stay Taught, over rhythm unbroken.But, oh, there's a schism unspoken, a mighty calling of the lee.An absentminded Pirate, unaccustomed to the sea;To the land, a traitor. I think it mightn't've ended well. What might've worked for me? What might've ended well?Soldier, to bloody sally forth through hell?Teacher of glorious stories to tell?Man of gold, or stores to sell?Lover to a gentle belle? Maybe a camel;A seashell.What mightn't've been a life where it mightn't've ended well?
— Dylan Thomas McCall
I fantasized how no matter what happened, no one could ever come between us, call it wishful thinking, I called it a fact.
— Holly Hood, Polar
Fate is not in man but around him
— Albert Camus
Jason decided there was nothing in the world scarier than a gang of bat-wielding grannies.
— Rick Riordan, The Blood of Olympus
You go into the office and take a book or two from the shelves. You read a few lines, like your life depended on reading 'em right. But you know your life doesn't depend on anything that makes sense, and you wonder where in the hell you got the idea it did; and you begin to get sore.
— Jim Thompson, The Killer Inside Me
Niall: We're tossed by the winds of fate. Once we end where they blow us, we make of ourselves that we will.
— Nora Roberts, Born in Fire
In the ill-judged execution of the well-judged plan of things the call seldom produces the comer, the man to love rarely coincides with the hour for loving
— Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles
To fate and the strange way that it twists us all together.
— Nora Roberts
Instead of comparing our lot with that of those who are more fortunate than we are, we should compare it with the lot of the great majority of our fellow men. It then appears that we are among the privileged.
— Helen Keller
We do not choose our fate, we can only choose if we accept it. Fate will take us where it will, whether we will it or not.” (Sister Mira)
— Brenda Cothern, Fates
The stage is a magic circle where only the most real things happen, a neutral territory outside the jurisdiction of Fate where stars may be crossed with impunity. A truer and more real place does not exist in all the universe.
— P.S. Baber, Cassie Draws the Universe
We start each day with a blank sheet of paper in front of us, and what we write on it is up to us.
— John Larkin, The Shadow Girl
Many men would take the death-sentence without a whimper, to escape the life-sentence which fate carries in her other hand.
— T.E. Lawrence
It was possible that I'd thrown one too many Molotov cocktails over God's fence.
— Maggie Stiefvater, Forever
Now when Túrin learnt from Finduilas of what had passed, he was wrathful, and he said to Gwindor: 'In love I hold you for your rescue and sake-keeping. But now you have done ill to me, friend, to betray my right name, and call my doom upon me, from which I would lie hid.'But Gwindor answered: 'The doom lies in yourself, not in your name.
— J.R.R. Tolkien, The Children of Húrin
Archer had always been inclined to think that chance and circumstance played a small part in shaping people's lots compared with their innate tendency to have things happen to them.
— Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
Glanced up and caught Ammu's gaze. Centuries telescoped into one evanescent moment. History was wrong-footed, caught off guard. Sloughed off like an old snakeskin. Its marks , its scars its wouns from old wars and the walking backwards days all fell away. In its abscence it left an aura, a palpable shimmering that was as plain as water in a river or the sun in the sky. As plain to feel the heat on a hot day, or the tug of a fish on a taut line. So obvious that no-one noticed. In that brief moment, Velutha looked up and saw things that he hadn't seen before. Things that had been out of bounds so far, obscured by histor's blinkers....This knowing slid into him cleanly, like the sharp edge of a knife. Cold and hot at once. It only took a moment. Ammu saw that he saw. She looked away. He did too. History's fiends returned to claim them. To rewrap them in its old scarred pelt and drag them back to where they really lived. Where the Love Laws lay down who should be loved. And how. And how much.
— Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things
There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,Rough-hew them how we will
— William Shakespeare, Hamlet
Ahab is for ever Ahab, man. This whole act's immutably decreed. 'Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before this ocean rolled. Fool! I am the Fates' lieutenant, I act under orders.
— Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale
It was strange even after suffering from fate, a person in love would choose the same fate over his life.
— Faraaz Kazi
A man is deficient in understanding until he perceives that there is a whole cycle of evolution possible within himself: repeating endlessly, offering opportunities for personal development.
— Idries Shah, Reflections
Certain things need not be said, and there’s nothing, not a whisper, prayer, not a sacrifice, not a payment of any price, that would change what’s about to happen.
— Alice Hoffman, Local Girls
Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow worldLike a Colossus, and we petty menWalk under his huge legs and peep aboutTo find ourselves dishonorable graves.Men at some time are masters of their fates.The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our starsBut in ourselves, that we are underlings.
— William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
I can't do nothing. Just put it off. And that don't do no good. I reckon it belong to me. I reckon what I going to get ain't no more than mine.
— William Faulkner, Collected Stories
Death wears a big hat.
— Elvis Costello
He is where he is supposed to be. And yet the place he has found is also of his own choosing. That is a piece of luck not to be despised.
— Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing
I believe in fate and I believe that things happen for a reason but I don't think that there's a high power, necessarily. I believe in karma very much though.
— Amy Winehouse
If you’re in your life, chance. Viewed from the outside, like a book you’re reading, it’s fate all the way.
— David Mitchell, Ghostwritten
Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? But if the great sun move not of himself; but is an errand-boy in heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible power; how then can this one small heart beat; this one small brain think thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I.
— Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
Everything happens for a reason.
— Ransom Riggs, Hollow City
You cannot outwit fate by placing little sidebets on the outcome of life. It's either you wade in and play in order to win or you don't play at all." - Matthew Farrell
— Judith McNaught, Paradise/Tender Triumph
My mother believed in God's will for many years. It was af if she had turned on a celestial faucet and goodness kept pouring out. She said it was faith that kept all these good things coming our way, only I thought she said "fate" because she couldn't pronounce the "th" sound in "fa
— Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club
he knew that fate was only a mythological concept
— Dean Koontz, Watchers
I was recalling that other world in which it had thrilled me, in a way, the surprise of thinking that I could be a person who would betray Daniel. Now I wondered if Daniel could surprise himself, could surprise me, by being such a person too. Would he let himself do such a thing? I didn’t think so. And then I wondered: Is it by will, then, that we are who we are? Do we decide, do we make ourselves, after a certain point in life?I tried to call up the moment when I had decided I could be such a person. It seemed to me I hadn’t quite got there, not really. That I was still just playing with the idea of it when the ground shifted under me. But perhaps to play with such an idea was already to be a certain kind of person.
— Sue Miller, While I Was Gone
No one doubts your courage, but you are a headstrong knight and when you choose a way you cannot change your course even if it lead to your destruction. That is your fault and your destiny.
— John Steinbeck, The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights
And I still say it was just a coincidence;' he muttered pugnaciously. 'You say it too! Look at me and say it! It was just a coincidence. That happened to be the nearest place on the dial where they both met exactly, those two hands. My blows dented them. They got stuck there just as the works died, that was all. Stay sane whatever you do. Say it over and over. It was just a coincidence!'Outside the tall French windows, in the velvety night-sky, the stars in all their glory twinkled derisively in at them. ("Speak To Me Of Death")
— Cornell Woolrich, The Fantastic Stories of Cornell Woolrich
But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry (of life) will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge of the world that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate.
— Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West
Anna Petrovna: I am beginning to think, doctor, that fate has cheated me. The majority of people, who maybe are no better than I am, are happy and pay nothing for that happiness. I have paid for everything, absolutely everything! And how dearly! Why have I paid such terrible interest?
— Anton Chekhov, Ivanov
Our tainted world looms within us, every one.
— Chang-rae Lee, On Such a Full Sea
The stars have not dealt me the worst they could do:My pleasures are plenty, my troubles are two.But oh, my two troubles they reave me of rest,The brains in my head and the heart in my breast.Oh, grant me the ease that is granted so free,The birthright of multitudes, give it to me,That relish their victuals and rest on their bedWith flint in the bosom and guts in the head.
— A.E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad
An cinniúnt, is dócha: féach an féileacán úd thall atá ag foluain os cionn mo choinnle. Ní fada go loiscfear a sciatháin mhaiseacha: cá bhfios dúinne nach bhfuil a fhios sin aige, freisin?
— Pádraic Ó Conaire, An Chéad Chloch
That was how the heroine of a book would play it and Diana was still writing her own story the best heroines she'd always believed took their fate into their own hands.
— Anna Godbersen, Envy
But Fate does iron wedges drive,And always crowds itself betwixt.
— Andrew Marvell
But the child shouldn't be blamed for the father's crime, she tried to reason with herself, then. But should the child therefore also enjoy the father's illicit gain?
— Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss
When I stand and contemplate my fate and see the path along which you have led me, what's the rest of it?
— Gabriel García Márquez, Of Love and Other Demons
If it had been a great necessity, if it had been contingents of an army meeting to overwhelm the enemy by stealth, it might not have worked out so neatly. But fate it would seem is a perfect strategist and will work miracles of timing to assist our destruction.
— Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture
You make choices that are good and sound, but the gods have other plans for you.
— Lisa See
Fantastic fortune thou deceitful light,That cheats the weary traveler by night,Though on a precipice each step you tread,I am resolved to follow where you lead.
— Aphra Behn, The Rover
I was coming up on a cross street when a man wearing a filthy suit stepped out from around the corner of the building ahead and directly into my path. Bent with age, he turned bleak red eyes to me and stared. Pressed with his chest to both hands he carried a paperback book as soiled and bereft as his suit. Are you one of the real ones or not? he demanded. And after a moment, when I failed to answer, he walked on, resuming his sotto voce conversation. A chill passed through me. Somehow, indefinably, I felt, felt with the kind of baffled, tacit understanding that we have in dreams , that I had just glimpsed one possible future self. 
— James Sallis, Black Hornet
One wouldn't wish to tempt fate
— Jude Morgan, Indiscretion
Life can be how you choose or are governed by fate.
— Steven Redhead, Life Is Simply A Game
(..)Fate has al­ways been a po­tent force in Rus­sia, where, for gen­er­ations, cit­izens have had lit­tle con­trol over their own des­tinies. Fate can be a bitch, but, as Za­it­sev, Dvornik, and Onofre­cuk had dis­cov­ered, it can al­so be a tiger.
— John Vaillant, The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival
My coming brought no profit to the sky,Nor does my going swell its glory;My two ears have never heard anyone that could say,Why I came here and why I will go away.
— Omar Khayyám
Thus was their relationship born on the swift kiss of a pun. Neither suspected what the other would become to each of them. Like phrases running wild in the Logos, they knew neither who nor by what mechanism nor for what reason they were whistled for (if they understood that they were whistled for at all). They were simply compelled to come together. Sophia was the question, and Blip was the answer. And vice versa.
— Tony Vigorito, Just a Couple of Days
It all seems like a horrible tragedy, with fate pressing on relentlessly to some destined end. Everything that one does seems, no matter how right it may be, to bring on the very thing which is most to be deplored.
— Bram Stoker, Dracula
Things take care of themselves  as long as you trust and don't try to control too much. Things will happen. Things tend to occur. Why resist what's inevitable? That's like swimming against the current, salmon notwithstanding. Go with the flow, you know? Glide with the glow, man. It's easier.
— Tony Vigorito, Just a Couple of Days
You are a Chosen Man. You are Parmenion, the Death of Nations. A hundred thousand souls will yousend to the dark river, screaming and wailing, lamenting their fate. It is right and just that youshould know your choices.
— David Gemmell, Lion of Macedon
A gamble. Everything was a damn gamble. Betting against luck and the Fates, again and again, and again. She kept walking, waiting for the bullet.
— Paolo Bacigalupi, The Drowned Cities
The banana flavour of his accidental conception, and the banana theme of his accidental death, now all seemed to conspire against him and rather suggest the universe, Mr Fate or whoever did have some sort of master plan after all. Despite all his earlier conjecturing, maybe the universe, Mr Fate or whoever was laughing its fat and meddling head at him. The outlandish evidence did seem to speak for itself, truly suggesting a mocking narrative devised by some mischievous author because quite simply a banana condom had brought Midnight into the world and a banana skin had seen him out. Putting those two seeming truths together, Midnight was once again forced to ask such confused and searching questions like:What is this place, where am I heading? And what’s the deal with all the ruddy bananas?
— Tom Conrad
Here is the fate of the man: To appear and to disappear!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
…and available man candy. But at least there would be mud, and maybe cows.” p12
— Claire Upton, Twisted Fate
After a thousand years pass, it builds its own funeral pyre, lining it with cinnamon, myrrh and cassia. Climbing to a rest on the very top, it examines the world all throughout the night with the ability to see true good and evil. When the sun rises the next morning, with great sorrow for all that it sees, it sings a haunting song. As it sings, the heat of the sun ignites the expensive spices and the Phoenix dies in the flames.But the Phoenix is not remarkable for its feathers or flames. It is most revered for its ability to climb from its own funeral pyre, from the very ashes of its old charred body, as a brand new life ready to live again once more. Life after life, it goes through this cycle. It absorbs human sorrow, only to rise from death to do it all again. It never wearies, it never tires. It never questions its fate. Some say that the Phoenix is real, that it exists somewhere out there in the mountains of Arabia, elusive and mysterious. Others say that the Phoenix is only a wish made by desperate humans to believe in the continuance of life.But I know a secret.We are the Phoenix.
— Courtney Cole, Every Last Kiss
He'd once known a man who said that life hinged on the moment, that everything changed in the blink of an eye. Tesseract knew the truth of that as well as anybody. It was in those moments that he struck, after all, snatching people's lives away. He'd always known that it was only a matter of time before one of those moment's worked against him.
— Derek Landy, Mortal Coil
Even if the decisions one made on a given day seemed crazy, it helped to think that all things happened for a mysterious reason.
— Lorna Jane Cook, Outside Wonderland
My brother was on his wayto a dental appointmentwhen the second plane hitfour stories below the officewhere he worked. He’s neversaid anything about the guywho took football bets, howhe liked to watch his secretarywalk, the friends he ate lunch with,all the funerals. Maybe, shamedby his luck, he keeps quiet,afraid someone might guesshow good he feels, breathing.
— Tony Gloeggler
I use this as a paradigm for our whole attitude toward life, what you did was you worked very hard, you try to understand and try to direct these complicated, powerful forces and at the very end of the struggle you've made no progress at all. That upon discovering that, you've raised to a lofty moral height, and you've accepted your fate, and somehow went on.
— Philip K. Dick
Maybe our mistakes are what make our fate.
— Sarah Jessica Parker
Sacredness and profanity and prayers and wishes: they're all held together by the broken limbs of this dead tree, raking the night sky with its blackened branches. We are so small, the two of us. The tree and sky are so large and grand. We could fail so easily, fall before we've begun to rise.
— Elora Bishop, Braided: A Lesbian Rapunzel
Andy was receptive, like a deep vessel into which life was poured. If this terrible particular thing hadn't been poured into her, she would have been happier--it goes without saying--but less of a person. She was filled out by her fate. I actually think that this is quite rare, the capacity to become the whole shape of the accidents that happen to you.
— Tessa Hadley
He watched the fire and if he saw portents there it was much the same to him. He would live to look upon the western sea and he was equal to whatever might follow for he was complete at every hour. Whether his history should run concomitant with men and nations, whether it should cease. He'd long forsworn all weighing of consequence and allowing as he did that men's destinies are given yet he usurped to contain within him all that he would ever be in the world and all that the world would be to him and be his charter written in the urstone itself he claimed agency and said so and he'd drive the remorseless sun on to its final endarkenment as if he'd ordered it all ages since, before there were paths anywhere, before there were men or suns to go upon them.
— Cormac McCarthy
Really," said Winifred suddenly; "it almost seems like Fate. Only that's so old-fashioned.
— John Galsworthy, The Forsyte Saga
I do not believe in a fate that falls on men however they act
—  but I do believe in a fate that falls on them unless they act.
Whatever is, is in its causes just;But purblind manSees but a part o' th' chain; the nearest link;His eyes not carrying to that equal beamThat poises all above.
— John Dryden, Oedipus: A Tragedy
Correlation is not cause, it is just a 'music of chance'.
— Siri Hustvedt, The Summer Without Men
Strange and harrowing must be his story; frightful the storm which embraced the gallant vessel on its course, and wrecked it--thus!
— Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein
It would be the irony of fate if my administration had to deal chiefly with foreign affairs.
— Woodrow Wilson
If free will means to do what you want, then it does not exist. Many of its staunchest proponents have met the wheel of fate without opposing it
— Bangambiki Habyarimana, Book of Wisdom
A person's name is a fate-conjuring incantation.
— Mark Leyner, The Sugar Frosted Nutsack
It’s an evil fate to fall into the hands of a persecutor who was once persecuted.
— Bangambiki Habyarimana, Book of Wisdom
Now of course in hindsight, such a wonderful thing, though never around when you actually need it, I know that I always loved her deeply.
— Ross  Turner, Jenson
..I buried myself in accomplishments, because with accomplishments, I believed I could control things, I could squeeze in every last piece of happiness before I got sick and died.. which I figured was my natural fate.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
Warner. A white bird with streaks of gold like a crown atop its head. A fair - skinned boy with gold hair, the leader of Sector 45. It was always him. All along . The link.
— Tahereh Mafi, Ignite Me
Perhaps there can be no thanks nor any blame, but only recognition of the forces that brought us and bound us to our inevitable fates.
— Robin Hobb, Assassin's Quest
You always have a choice. You can't stop what's coming, but you can decide how you meet it. The fate of the world is out of your hands. It always was. But your fate--what you decide to do right now-- is still up to you.
— G. Willow Wilson, Ms. Marvel, Vol. 4: Last Days
It is the lumps and trialsThat tell us whether we shall be knownAnd whether our fate can be exemplary, like a star.
— John Ashbery, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror
But I must warn you, Miss Hathaway ... life has a way of fouling up our plans. I speak from experience.
— Lisa Kleypas, Mine Till Midnight
The difference between me and Duchi, in one sentence, is this: I say, things will be all right, and if they aren't, that's all right too. Duchi says, things will not be all right, and if they are, that's not all right either. OK, two sentences.
— Assaf Gavron, Almost Dead
If we are to tempt fate, then let us not be cowards about it.
— Christopher Paolini, Inheritance
Maybe she hated being out of control, knowing that someone or something else was dictating her fate. Because it's really not fair. A drunk driver runs a red light, and you end up dead. A guy in a movie theater coughs on you, and you catch some rare, fatal disease. You sit in class minding your own business, and there's the kid from sixth period holding a gun in his hand. Why should other people be in control? Why should someone else get to choose when you die?
— Chelsea Sedoti, The Hundred Lies of Lizzie Lovett
If you pursue this road that you've embarked upon, you will eventually come to moral decisions that will take you completely by surprise
— Cormac McCarthy
I’m not absolutely certain of my facts, but I rather fancy it’s Shakespeare—or, if not, it’s some equally brainy lad—who says that it’s always just when a chappie is feeling particularly top-hole, and more than usually braced with things in general that Fate sneaks up behind him with a bit of lead piping.
— P.G. Wodehouse
I fear no fate for l am radiant with lightI win regardless with Jesus in me ,For l am in him He is in me
— Sikhwetha maanda
Isn't that the way everything begins? A night, a love, a once and for all.
— Sarah Dessen, Once and for All
Everything in life had its phases, and if you were smart, you learned to appreciate them all. What really mattered, though, were the people in those moments with you. Memories are what we have and what we keep, and I held mine close. The ones I knew well, like a night on the beach with a boy who would always live in my heart, and the ones yet to come with another.
— Sarah Dessen, Once and for All
For you, I wish for second chances
— Sarah Dessen, Once and for All
... life is a series of tiny, unavoidable decisions.
— Steven Galloway, The Cellist of Sarajevo
I realize we all walk around pretending we have some control over our fate, because to recognize the truth--that no matter what we do, the bottom will fall out when we least expect it--is just too unbearable to live with.
— Julie Buxbaum, What to Say Next
...knew the futility of agonizing over why things had transpired as they had. What could have happened, did.
— Raymond E. Feist, King of Foxes
The most fundamental change in people at this time was a weakening of their sense of individual identity
—  their sense of fate grew correspondingly stronger.
It felt like fate. That if Gray Shadow and Caius could not find their way to each other, their bloodlines eventually did.
— S.J. Himes, Wolf of the Northern Star
Or how does it happen that trade, which after all is nothing more than the exchange of products of various individuals and countries, rules the whole world through the relation of supply and demand—a relation which, as an English economist says, hovers over the earth like the fate of the ancients, and with invisible hand allots fortune and misfortune to men, sets up empires and overthrows empires, causes nations to rise and to disappear—while with the abolition of the basis of private property, with the communistic regulation of production (and implicit in this, the destruction of the alien relation between men and what they themselves produce), the power of the relation of supply and demand is dissolved into nothing, and men get exchange, production, the mode of their mutual relation, under their own control again?
— Karl Marx, The German Ideology
Death is inevitable destiny.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Since then many years have passed, and in those years I have often thought how strange are the ways of Fate. Set on one's waylay a single ill-considered spontaneous remark, one is led into a course of action that cannot be stopped whether one wants to or not. At the moment of departure we do not even dream of where our voyage will take us. Even when we have started we deluded ourselves for an unconscionable time that in a short while it will soon be over, and we shall be free again to do as we please. Sometimes, in forests, one meets two such paths that, although divided perhaps by a stream or ditch, seem at first sight to run parallel to one another. One imagines that whichever one chooses will lead us to the same place. However, slowly the paths diverge...and never meet again.
— Miklós Bánffy, The Phoenix Land
He pondered long over this, for might not another man, returning to another valley, have found none of these things? Why was it given to one man to have his pain transmuted into gladness? Why was it given to one man to have such an awareness of God?
— Alan Paton, Cry, the Beloved Country
The further we are from the last disaster, the closer we are to the next.
— Daniel Silva, The Kill Artist
My fate is written by my God. It can never be wrong.
— Irfa Rahat
Fate is not satisfied with inflicting one calamity.
— Publilius Syrus
Though I did not know her exact address, that she appeared to live almost within breathing distance of Robin, and that I lived with him, and that her pictures showed that she was now dating the mysterious Rupert Hunter, our despotic mothers, our absent fathers, the borders we had both crossed, all our many parallels and connections at every point, could not be chance. I saw it as evidence of the hidden connections between things, an all-powerful algorithm that sifted through chaos, singling out soulmates.
— Olivia Sudjic, Sympathy
It is not your fate that is your verdict, but how you deal with your fate. If you find yourself in a story contrary to every vow you have made or wish to make, then you must silence your mind and observe everything closely. You must see the patterns of possible fates in the world around you and choose that which your holy soul tells you to choose." - Thordis, Thunder priestess
— Maria Kvilhaug, The Hel Runes Claim: Life of the Oseberg priestess (783-834 AD)
It was like she had been playing 'nhodo' with her life, foolishly trying to outsmart an imaginary playmate named Fate.
— Panashe Chigumadzi, Sweet Medicine
Fate always found its mark, one way or another.
— Janell Rhiannon, Rise of Princes
No man his the master of his fate.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Fate," Bizzy said, "adjusts quicker 'n a hungery dog can lick a dish.
— Jennifer Anne Kogler, The Death Catchers
Fate is for the weak--those people who don't have enough power or will to shape life into what they need it to be.
— Erin Watt, Paper Princess
He had the strangest feeling come over him, which he'd never before known. Like he was meeting his best friend, for the first time. It was recognition mixed with relief...but also some amount of joy. Like, "Oh, there you are! It's so great to meet you finally! I've missed you!
— Elizabeth Gannon, Nobody Likes Fairytale Pirates
But that's the thing about fate. It comes whether you're ready for it or not.
— Jennifer Anne Kogler, The Death Catchers
Sometimes a cigar is just a smoke and a coincidence is just a coincidence.
— Stephen King, 11/22/63
It's a book that says the same thing almost all the other books in the world say," continued the old man. "It describes people's inability to choose their own Personal Legends. And it ends up saying that everyone believes the world's greatest lie." "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
This was what we did as a species, after all: we built ingenious devices, and we destroyed things.
— Mark O'Connell, To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death
SOSTRATUS: Observe then your injustice! You punish us who are but the slaves of Clotho's bidding, and reward these, who do but minister to another's beneficence. For it will never be said that it was in our power to gainsay the irresistible ordinances of Fate?MINOS: Ah, Sostratus; look closely enough, and you will find plenty of inconsistencies besides these. However, I see you are no common pirate, but a philosopher in your way; so much you have gained by your questions. Let him go, Hermes; he shall not be punished after that. But mind, Sostratus, you must not put it into other people's heads to ask questions of this kind.
— Lucian of Samosata, مسامرات الأموات واستفتاء ميت
Fate goes ever as fate must.
— Seamus Heaney, Beowulf
I need to tell you a story.'What 
— Emma Richler, Be My Wolff
I need to tell you a story, a tale of fate and emergence.
— Emma Richler, Be My Wolff
Dreams are built around the word hello, but in the end fate only knows the word goodbye.
— Shannon L. Alder
They had been talking about his friend Z. when she announced, "If I hadn't met you, I'd certainly have fallen in love with him."Even then, her words had left Tomas in a strange state of melancholy, and now he realized it was only a matter of chance that Tereza loved him and not his friend Z. Apart from her consummated love for Tomas, there were, in the realm of pos­sibility, an infinite number of unconsummated loves for other men. We all reject out of hand the idea that the love of our life may be something light or weightless; we presume our love is what must be, that without it our life would no longer be the same; we feel that Beethoven himself, gloomy and awe-inspir­ing, is playing the "Es muss sein!" to our own great love.Tomas often thought of Tereza's remark about his friend Z. and came to the conclusion that the love story of his life exemplified not "Es muss sein!" (It must be so), but rather "Es konnte auch anders sein" (It could just as well be otherwise).
— Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
And when I think about it, I guess it is true that people always arrive at the right moment at the place where someone awaits them
— Paulo Coelho
e had the strangest feeling come over him, which he'd never before known. Like he was meeting his best friend, for the first time. It was recognition mixed with relief...but also some amount of joy. Like, 'Oh, there you are! It's so great to meet you finally! I've missed you!
— Elizabeth Gannon, Nobody Likes Fairytale Pirates
Whenever you are given two choices, look out for the third option.
— Sara Arinto
Felix has always believed that if there is one thing in life that is fated it is our birth, that far-fetched conspiracy of circumstances which have to occur in order for us to get born.
— Glenn Haybittle, The Memory Tree
But, I get this feeling that if I stay close to you, I'll find what I'm looking for
— Jamie Magee, Insight
From this moment forth, my sword shall be with you and your fate shall be with me.
— Kinoko Nasu, Fate/Stay Night
Born distinct from each other, the invisible magical thread destined by fate. The thread may stretch or tangle but never break, as your presence will make the bond stronger between US.
— Sarvesh Murthi .D .D
By walking on the right path, you create a golden fate for yourself and you also become a silver lining for the others!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
This is the world in which everyone is sensitised to risk but indifferent to fate.
— David Runciman
I had started to desire power, because what I now realised was that other people had had it all along, that what I called fate was merely the reverberation of their will, a tale scripted not by some universal storyteller but by people who would elude justice for as long as their actions were met with resignation rather than outrage.
— Rachel Cusk, Transit
The truth is, our parents are but part of the equation that forms us―because the only thing more powerful than fate is free will.
— Romina Russell, Wandering Star
Worrying about outcomes over which I have no control is punishing myself before the universe has decided whether I ought to be punished.
— Sherry Thomas, A Study in Scarlet Women
Thus Time, and all-states-ordering CeremonyHad banished all offense: Time’s golden thighUpholds the flowery body of the earthIn sacred harmony, and every birthOf men and actions makes legitimate,Being used aright. The use of time is Fate.---From “Hero and Leander, Sestiad III
— Christopher Marlowe, Complete Poems and Translations
The frenzies of the chase had by this time worked them bubblingly up, like old wine worked anew. Whatever pale fears and forebodings some of them might have felt before; these were not only now kept out of sight through the growing awe of Ahab, but they were broken up, and on all sides routed, as timid prairie hares that scatter before the bounding bison. The hand of Fate had snatched all their souls; and by the stirring perils of the previous day; the rack of the past night's suspense; the fixed, unfearing, blind, reckless way in which their wild craft went plunging towards its flying mark; by all these things, their hearts were bowled along. The wind that made great bellies of their sails, and rushed the vessel on by arms invisible as irresistible; this seemed the symbol of that unseen agency which so enslaved them to the race.They were one man, not thirty. For as the one ship that held them all; though it was put together of all contrasting things — oak, and maple, and pine wood; iron, and pitch, and hemp — yet all these ran into each other in the one concrete hull, which shot on its way, both balanced and directed by the long central keel; even so, all the individualities of the crew, this man's valor, that man's fear; guilt and guiltiness, all varieties were welded into oneness, and were all directed to that fatal goal which Ahab their one lord and keel did point to.The rigging lived. The mast-heads, like the tops of tall palms, were outspreadingly tufted with arms and legs. Clinging to a spar with one hand, some reached forth the other with impatient wavings; others, shading their eyes from the vivid sunlight, sat far out on the rocking yards; all the spars in full bearing of mortals, ready and ripe for their fate. Ah! how they still strove through that infinite blueness to seek out the thing that might destroy them!
— Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale
I make no apologies for you. After all, each one of us is little more than the meager residue of the infinite unrealized possibilities of our lives.
— Gregory Frost
Observe your path ahead carefully
—  see the dangers and the opportunities! By this way you can write your own fate with your own judgements!
You are here because Fate invited you. You cannot go back the way you came. I suggest you go forward instead.
— Emigh Cannaday, The Flame and the Arrow
The way you make use of your brain, heart, and body, any consequence out of it, has to be faced by you. God or creator never interferes with your action or its consequence. Everything happens out of the process.
— Roshan Sharma
Chance or fate has, yes, participation in your life. But how much it happens, it's up to you.
— 1 Minuto na Palma da Mão
It was just the way he was made.
— Ross  Turner, Reaper
An admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition on the charge of a star!
— William Shakespeare, King Lear
When a nation leaves the fate of his country to an ignorant and fool person, then that nation itself will be remembered in the history as ignorant and fool nation!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
There's a Chinese saying that the fates are winds that blow through our lives from every angle, urging us along the paths of time. Those who are strong-willed may fight the storm and possibly choose their own road, while the weak must go where they are blown. I say I have not been so much pushed by winds as pulled forward by the force of my decisions.
— Jean Kwok, Girl in Translation
Yet her experience had consisted less in a series of pure disappointments than in a series of substitutions. Continually it had happened that what she had desired had not been granted her, and that what had been granted her she had not desired. So she viewed with an approach to equanimity the now cancelled days when Donald had been her undeclared lover, and wondered what unwished-for thing Heaven might send her in place of him.
— Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge
And all this while the subtle-souled girl asking herself why she was born, why sitting in a room, and blinking at the candle; why things around her had taken the shape they wore in preference to every other possible shape.
— Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge
The small launch bay was littered with debris. A powerful breeze tore at his black silk shirt as Kilroy made his way across it to the waiting shuttle, evoking a feeling like the fingers of fate were caressing his body. “The Hammer” stepped over the body of one of his fallen crew without a trace of care or concern. The air was rushing past him, like a wind, out into space through the wounds in the side of his ship. Fatigued and desperate, the Hammer was running out of options. His ship was a mess, holed in a dozen places, the life support systems failing. Weakened hull sections were collapsing in pressure bursts. The vibrations that shook the deck beneath him now were not from the engines that once drove her forward, but now from the explosions down below, tearing her apart.
— Christina Engela, Dead Beckoning
We are creatures taken seriously by the Earth, because we can severely affect the fate of the Earth, but we are in no way taken seriously by the Universe yet!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
A tractor beam from the Imperial ship locked onto the shuttle and in seconds it became apparent they were being hauled in. The tractor was inescapable, and they knew it. The shuttle’s small yet potent engines struggled vainly against the irresistible pull. Inside, the Hammer and his men prepared to meet their fate.
— Christina Engela, Dead Beckoning
If you sleep on the train, you will miss your station; if you sleep at the station, you will miss your train! You can control your fate only when you are awake!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
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. But if you keep waiting for the doors to be opened for you..." she trails off.
— Gayle Forman, Just One Year
It was like finding out the world was made of gossamer and could be so easily ripped apart. To be solely at the mercy of fate.
— Gayle Forman, Just One Year
I'll see you soon. I promise.”And there is, that moment, a shock of recognition. Elijah doesn't even know yet what he is recognizing. There is only the shock. The sense. That feeling of something happening that was meant to happen. Two people fitting in a space and time.For a moment.
— David Levithan, Are We There Yet?
Every person has the power to change their fate if they are brave enough to fight for what they desire more than anything.
— Stephanie Garber, Caraval
Only what you choose is what makes you.
— Ross  Turner, Reaper
The truth is often of no consequence.
— Ross  Turner, Reaper