Fated Quotes & Sayings

Packed with fascinating personal perspective and testimony, Michael Takiffs A Complicated Man wholly justifies its title. The book is far more than a kaleidoscopic oral biography of President Bill Clinton. Aspect by aspect, it guides us through the struggles of postmodern America, as the most ambitious baby boomer of his generation seeks to modernize the Democratic Party-and, as in a Greek drama, is fated to be destroyed. Veritably, an all-American saga, with a cast of thousands-favorable and unfavorable. — Nigel Hamilton

If warming were held to a minimum, the team estimated that between 22 and 31 percent of the species would be "committed to extinction" by 2050. If warming were to reach what was at that point considered a likely maximum - a figure that now looks too low - by the middle of this century, between 38 and 52 percent of the species would be fated to disappear. — Elizabeth Kolbert

Mira's never wrong. Whatever she showed you tonight, it's fated to be."
"Fated", he said, sounding amused by that. "Well, shit. Then I guess we're doomed. — Lara Adrian

I am always torn. Between control and chaos; passion and tranquility. Between what's fated and what I want. Part of me longs to take the plunge, to dive off headfirst and let the feeling of control evaporate on the wind. And part of me wants to be in a place where I'd never have to worry about that choice
or any choice. Where peace and calm are the only things I'd feel. — Jocelyn Davies

Who now strides on my trail
devouring the distance between
no matter how I flee, the wasted
breath of my haste cast into the wind
and these dogs will prevail
dragging me down in howling glee
for the beasts were born fated,
trained in bold vengeance
by my own switch and hand
and no god will stand in my stead,
nor provide me sanctuary, even
should I plead for absolution -
the hounds of my deeds belong
only to me, and they have long hunted
and now the hunt ends. — Steven Erikson

A boy and a girl, fated to rule all. Two will rise, and One will fall. — James Patterson

So ... this means we're buried in the same cemetery?"
He nodded, and then the tiniest smile crept over his features. When he spoke again, his tone had lost some of its bitter edge. "More proof that we're fated to be together, don't you think?"
"If that were the case, Eli, I'd have a whole graveyard full of choices, wouldn't I? — Tara Hudson

Have you ever done something so far out of your normal behavior that it was freeing?" She wouldn't plead, but she wasn't above a little coercion. She whispered into his ear and gave the lobe a quick nibble. "I mean. We're stuck here together. I like you a lot and have talked to you more than anyone else in a long time. If this was a date I'd be thinking of letting you into my apartment for a nightcap or whatever it is people call it now. Want to throw morals and all that out the window for a little bit? — Lea Barrymire

We are ill-fated in that our society demands we engage in unworthy conversations and dances in order to seem courteous, and yet such actions are ultimately vulgar. — Shannon Hale

It was a great peace, as if the earth had been one grave, and for a time I stood there thinking mostly of the living who, buried in remote places out of the knowledge of mankind, are still fated to share in its tragic or grotesque miseries. In its noble struggles too
who knows? The human heart is vast enough to contain all the world. It is valient enough to bear the burden, but where is the courage that would cast it off? — Joseph Conrad

Souls soar high above reach,
Hands extend but never touch,
Words exchanged in dulcet tones,
Tis a fated moment to understand one's truth,
Time to let go. — Truth Devour

I tell you of loss, my child, so you will listen, slowly, and know that in life every emotion is fated to rear itself within your being. Don't judge it proper or ugly. It's simply there and yours. When you should happen to cry, then cry, knowing that just as easily you will laugh again and cry again. Your feelings will enter the currents of your core and there they shall remain — Thanhha Lai

Bree turned to him and gave him an uneasy nod. She had no idea if they were gonna make things better or worse, but she had to know for herself what Francesca had gone through, where she lived and why she made the decisions she had. If she could find out more about the ill-fated romance between Francesca and Adriano, maybe she and Alessandro could avoid a similar, miserable ending. — E. Jamie

I miss you Annabeth. I know it's wrong, but I can't stop thinkin' about you. I think about you all the damn time. — Ashleigh Z.

We were all fated to die, and so it is good that at least we can be sure our deaths today might bring about a good end, might make the world a better place. — Orson Scott Card

Sometimes it happens that the most insane thought, the most impossible conception, will become so fixed in one's head that at length one believes the thought or the conception to be reality. Moreover, if with the thought or the conception there is combined a strong, a passionate, desire, one will come to look upon the said thought or conception as something fated, inevitable, and foreordained - something bound to happen. Whether by this there is connoted something in the nature of a combination of presentiments, or a great effort of will, or a self-annulment of one's true expectations, and so on, I do not know; — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Love was everyone's to experience if they opened their hearts, but true love was a rare and sterling thing, damn if it wasn't, a sterling thing that required the intervention of destiny: two hearts fated to be as one, finding each other among the billions of the world. True love, by God, was the Excalibur of emotions, and if you recognized it when you saw it, if you drew that noble, shining blade from the stone, your life would be a grand adventure even if you lived it entirely in one small town. — Dean Koontz

... for everything now felt as if it had been fated or had happened before. — C.S. Lewis

I believe life is fated - what's going to happen will happen. — Kierston Wareing

We aren't fated to survive, then at least let us fight it to the end. Let it be fate that extinguishes us, not our own lack of heart. — Robin Hobb

We are fated to love one another; we hardly exist outside our love, we are just animals without it, with a birth and a death and constant fear between. Our love has lifted us up, out of the dreadfulness of merely living. — John Updike

I do believe in fate and destiny, but I also believe we are only fated to do the things that we'd choose anyway. — Kiersten White

I came of baseball age (isn't it always around first grade?) in the last sputtering years of the A's Philadelphia tenancy. I probably plighted my fated troth in 1949, when the A's fluked into a winning season and introduced a pintsize southpaw named Bobby Shantz. — Richard Corliss

the world's cheapest small car, Tata's Nano, worth only $1500. This toy-like ill-fated vehicle, whose destiny it was to look as if it had been prematurely brought into the world, more foetus than car, and whose birth was near abortive and then indefinitely delayed, this car, when it finally took to the road, turned out to have an engine that at times exploded mysteriously. Until 2009, it was seen to be Bengal's quirky but irreplaceable mascot for development. — Amit Chaudhuri

I'll go to another country, go to another shore,
find another city better than this one.
Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong
and my heart -like something dead- lies buried.
How long can I let my mind moulder in this place?
Wherever I turn, wherever I look,
I see the black ruins of my life, here,
where I've spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them totally.
You won't find a new country, won't find another shore.
This city will always pursue you.
You'll walk the same streets, grow old
in the same neighbourhoods, turn grey in these same houses.
You'll always end up in this city. Don't hope for things elsewhere:
there's no ship for you, there's no road.
Now that you've wasted your life here, in this small corner,
you've destroyed it everywhere in the world. — Constantine P. Cavafy

I do believe that certain people are fated to meet each other, to teach each other something essential, or show each other something essential. I can' t believe its all a coincidence — Wayne Hoffman

I am just going outside and may be some time. Reportedly the last words of Lawrence Oates according to Captain Robert Falcon Scott, who commanded the ill-fated expedition to the South Pole 1911/12. — Captain Lawrence Edward Grace Oates

Obviously, we're all going to die at some point. Whether or not we are fated to die in some way I think is debatable. I just don't know which side to debate. — Mary Elizabeth Winstead

All of them. Fated to love in vain. — Anne Rouen

We were always fated to be together. He is my everything. He is my entire world...
...Styx is my salvation. — Tillie Cole

Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie Which we ascribe to heaven; the fated sky Gives us free scope; and only backward pulls Our slow designs when we ourselves are dull. How much I could do if I only tried. * (1803-1873) English dramatist, novelist, and politician. — Napoleon Hill

No matter how pathetic or pitiful, every human is fated to have one moment in their lives in which they can change their own destiny. — Takayuki Yamaguchi

Preferring the nausea of the path to its fated and certain ending. — Patrick Bryant

His idea was still with me, because it was not a vapor sunshine could disperse, nor a sand-traced effigy storms could wash away; it was a name graven on a tablet, fated to last as long as the marble it inscribed. The craving to know what had become of him followed me everywhere. — Charlotte Bronte

I always knew it was ill-fated, but he truly believed I would be his bride. I guess I'd never realized that before. He had taken my mucker hand and looked at my mottled face and believed we would wed. And he hadn't seemed sorry. In fact, he'd swooped me up in a corridor and kissed me.
That set me to crying. — Shannon Hale

This is the end of Prime Minister, Cardinal Archbishop Lomenie de Brienne. Flimsier mortal was seldom fated to do as weighty a mischief; to have a life as despicable-envied, an exit as frightful. Fired, as the phrase is, with ambition: blown, like a kindled rag, the sport of winds, not this way, not that way, but of all ways, straight towards such a powder-mine, - which he kindled! Let us pity the hapless Lomenie; and forgive him; and, as soon as possible, forget him. — Thomas Carlyle

It's hard to look at it like that, isn't it? Because if you can be a better parent than the ones you had, you have to face the fact that your parents had that choice too. If you're not fated to be an awful parent, they weren't either. And," I said feeling my throat tighten, "it's easier to believe that we're all just [f*'d] than it is to know there are choices." I rubbed my hands together to try to get my fingers to warm up. "It hurts less to think they couldn't have done any better than they did, doesn't it? — Allie Larkin

[K]nowing one's fate never made a whit of difference, except it made the fated a tad more anxious. — Gene Doucette

The mounting evidence of an erosion of skills, a dulling of perceptions, and a slowing of reactions should give us all pause. As we begin to live our lives inside glass cockpits, we seem fated to discover what pilots already know: a glass cockpit can also be a glass cage. — Nicholas Carr

No one's fated or doomed to love anyone.
The accidents happen, we're not heroines,
they happen in our lives like car crashes,
books that change us, neighborhoods
we move into and come to love.
Tristan and Isolde is scarcely the story,
women at least should know the difference
between love and death. No poison cup,
no penance. Merely a notion that the tape-recorder
should have caught some ghost of us: that tape-recorder
not merely played but should have listened to us,
and could instruct those after us:
this we were, this is how we tried to love,
and these are the forces they had ranged against us,
and these are the forces we had ranged within us,
within us and against us, against us and within us. — Adrienne Rich

Everywhere in life, no matter where it may run its course, whether amid its harsh, raspingly poor, and squalidly mildewing lowly ranks, or amid its monotonously frigid and depressingly tidy upper classes - everywhere, if it be but once, man is fated to meet a phenomenon that is unlike all that which he may have chanced to meet hitherto; which, if but once, will awaken within him an emotion that is unlike all those which he is fated to experience all life long. Everywhere, running counter to all the sorrows of which our life is woven, a glittering joy will gaily flash by, as, at times, a glittering equipage with gold on its gear, with its picturesque horses, and sparkling because of its gleaming plate glass will suddenly, unexpectedly, speed by some backwoods poverty-stricken hamlet that had never beheld anything but a country cart, — Nikolai Gogol

There are certain people fated to be fools; they not only commit follies by choice, but are even constrained to do so by fortune. — Francois De La Rochefoucauld

If there's one thing all diviners share, it's curiosity. We really can't help it; it's just part of who we are. If you dug out a tunnel somewhere in the wilderness a thousand miles from anywhere and hung a sign on it saying, 'Warning, this leads to the Temple of Horrendous Doom. Do not enter, ever. No, not even then', you'd get back from lunch to find a diviner already inside and two more about to go in.

Come to think about it, that might explain why there are so few of us. — Benedict Jacka

How shall we embrace the common man: give us a reason without a doubt?
Is Everyman fated as an island unto himself 'til his last bright day goes by? — David B. Lentz

A cruel joke has been played on us. We are fated always to remember what we learned but never to recall the experiences that taught us. Who can remember being born? Yet, it is possible to speculate that anxiety has its roots in this experience, that dread of abandonment, fears of separation, intolerable loneliness go back to this moment. Who can remember being cared for as an infant? ... Who can remember being toilet-trained? ... Who can remember the attachment which developed to the parent of the opposite sex? ... We cannot remember but what we have forgotten lives on dynamically. — Jo Coudert

Happiness is bliss - but ignorance is anesthetic, and in the face of what's to come, that may be all we can hope for our ill-fated acquaintances. — William Ritter

Opposites attract, mom.'
'Yes, but in your case, darling, it is hydrogen and oxygen, and we all know what happened the Hindenberg.'
Just in case their daughter wasn't aware of the ill-fated zeppelin, Lambert clarified: 'This too will end in flames. — Jonathan Dunne

Do you know what a fate map is in biology? It's a map of which cells in an embryo should develop into which specific adult tissues. But what they should develop into isn't necessarily what they actually do develop into. They can be manipulated, or change on their own, and end up as something completely different from what they were fated for. — Maggie Hall

Some 2,600 years ago the ancient Greek poet Pindar wrote, "Become who you are by learning who you are." What he meant is the following: You are born with a particular makeup and tendencies that mark you as a piece of fate. It is who you are to the core. Some people never become who they are; they stop trusting in themselves; they conform to the tastes of others, and they end up wearing a mask that hides their true nature. If you allow yourself to learn who you really are by paying attention to that voice and force within you, then you can become what you were fated to become - an individual, a Master. — Robert Greene

I would do anything I could to go back to that time when we could have been together and change the way I acted. I'd change it, because we were fated to be together however brief, however unbelievable, however painful, however flawed.- Jack Howard — K.A. Linde

The mystery of human destiny is that we are fated, but that we have the freedom to fulfill or not fulfill our fate: realization of our fated destiny depends on us. While inhuman beings like the cockroach realize the entire cycle without going astray because they make no choices. — Clarice Lispector

A mother should give her children a superabundance of enthusiasm; that after they have lost all they are sure to lose on mixing with the world, enough may still remain to prompt fated support them through great actions. — Augustus Hare

The two of us warmed by a bold beam of light that wicks the moisture from my dress, my hair, and my skin - returning it to the sky where it promises to find me again in the form of dew, snow, or rain. — Alyson Noel

The ancient sanskirt legends speak of a destined love, a karmic connection between souls that are fated to meet and collide and enrapture one another. the legends say that the loved one is instantly recognised because she's loved in every gesture, every expression of thought, every movement, every sound, and every mood that prays in her eyes. the legends say that we know her by her wings - the wings that only we can see - and because wanting her kills every other desire of love. the same legends also carry warnings that such fated love may, sometimes, be the possession and the obsession of one, and only one, of the two souls twinned by destiny. but wisdom, in one sense, is the opposite of love. love survives in us precisely because it isn't wise. — Gregory David Roberts

Once they had been equal in their separate freedoms. They had set out to have children as lightly as if they were playing house, and now her necessarily domestic life bored him, and she was bound to it in her body and imagination. This imbalance was fated, built into their biology. — Tessa Hadley

It was inevitable I loved you - we were soul mates - for the same reason, we were fated to suffer ... — John Geddes

Our decisions become narratives: fated choices that unknowably change the course of the living river. In the present, where decisions and connections are made, Fate waits on the riverbank of Story, leaving us to our mistakes and miracles, because it's our will alone that leads us to one or the other. — Gregory David Roberts

Facebook is by far the largest of these social networking sites, and starting with its ill-fated Beacon service, privacy concerns have more than once been raised about how the ubiquitous social networking site handles its user data. — Michael Bennet

Primarily, 'Black Girl/White Girl' is the story of two very different, yet somehow 'fated' girls; for Genna, her 'friendship' with Minette is the most haunting of her life, though it is one-sided and ends in tragedy. — Joyce Carol Oates

In fact, every child on earth born after June 23, 1988 belongs to what I call Generation Hot. This generation includes some two billion young people, all of whom have grown up under global warming and are fated to spend the rest of their lives confronting its mounting impacts. — Mark Hertsgaard

A person with a melancholy temperament had been fated with both an awful burden and what Byron called "a fearful gift." The burden was a sadness and despair that could tip into a state of disease. But the gift was a capacity for depth, wisdom - even genius. — Joshua Wolf Shenk

What matters most, is not how my end happens, or if it happens now. What I care about in this instant, is that she knows how much I love her - that I lived long enough to have her love me back. — Emm Cole

When a high-profile personality lives like I do, everybody thinks that person is fated to die young. — Dennis Rodman

Inde fernut, titidem qui vivere debeat annos, corpre de patrio parvum phenica renasci' It's from Ovid. It means, 'A little phoenix is born anew from the father's body, fated to live the same number of years. — Ian Caldwell

And thus, having been assured by Themis, the mother of the Fates,that it was fated that she & the God of War should meet, Aphrodite, with downcast eyes,informed the Goddess of Oracles, Rites & Laws that she would be happy to accept Ares' challenge, adding that she thought that Mars sounded better than Ares & that she would prefer to call him Mars if he would call her Venus. — Nicholas Chong

Red Rover, Red Rover, send Ardor right over," Eliza said. They laughed. The asteroid was a little bigger now, brighter, and still they went on laughing. Laughing in the face of what they couldn't predict or change or control. Would it be fire and brimstone? Would it be Armageddon? Or would it be a second chance? Eliza held tight to her friends, laughing, and a pair of hands land soft as feathers on her shoulders, like the hands of a ghost, laughing and laughing as Ardor swept along its fated course, laughing and through that laughter, praying. Praying for forgiveness. Praying for grace. Praying for mercy.
















0 — Tommy Wallach

To be fated to lose. To know destiny itself the architect of my torment. Can it be true? Is to be Loki to be without hope? And if so...to whom can a god appeal for mercy? — Robert Rodi

There are people who wring their hands and call it an abyss, but do nothing to fill it; there are also those who work to widen it, as if the scientist and literary man belong to two different human subspecies, reciprocally incomprehensible, fated to ignore each other and not apt to engage in cross-fertilization. — Primo Levi

What we were trying to do was take the notion of Greek tragedy, of fated and doomed people, and instead of these Olympian gods, indifferent, venal, selfish, hurling lightning bolts and hitting people in the ass for no reason - instead of those guys whipping it on Oedipus or Achilles, it's the postmodern institutions ... those are the indifferent gods. — David Simon

But to everything in this world there comes an end; there even comes an end to the torments suffered in those intermediate states of transition when the last secret tear of one's soul is bitterly swallowed, and the crisis passes, resolving itself into some new sort of phase, which even as it comes into existence is fated in turn to pass away, to disappear in the eternal changing of the times and seasons. — Nikolai Bukharin

I just can't do it anymore. It's too painful. It doesn't mean I'm over you, it means I'm not going to waste the rest of my life being haunted by your memory. — Ashleigh Z.

Am I fated to have the men I've loved torment me in my weakest moments? — Stephanie Dray

Destiny is a worrying concept. I don't want to be fated, I want to choose. — Jeanette Winterson

It is an old saying, abundantly justified, that where sciences meet there growth occurs. It is true moreover to say that in scientific borderlands not only are facts gathered that [are] often new in kind, but it is in these regions that wholly new concepts arise. It is my own faith that just as the older biology from its faithful studies of external forms provided a new concept in the doctrine of evolution, so the new biology is yet fated to furnish entirely new fundamental concepts of science, at which physics and chemistry when concerned with the non-living alone could never arrive. — Frederick Gowland Hopkins

Sonnet: To the River Otter

Dear native brook! wild streamlet of the West!
How many various-fated years have passed,
What happy and what mournful hours, since last
I skimmed the smooth thin stone along thy breast,
Numbering its light leaps! Yet so deep impressed
Sink the sweet scenes of childhood, that mine eyes
I never shut amid the sunny ray,
But straight with all their tints thy waters rise,
Thy crossing plank, thy marge with willows grey,
And bedded sand that, veined with various dyes,
Gleamed through thy bright transparence! On my way,
Visions of childhood! oft have ye beguiled
Lone manhood's cares, yet waking fondest sighs:
Ah! that once more I were a careless child! — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

I was alone, without a single cent, in an unknown country. If I'd learned anything from last year's ill-fated adventures, though, it was not to get overwhelmed by minor inconveniences. — Isabel Allende

It's that second when a man looks into your eyes and not only sees your soul, but identifies with it, a rare connection of two persons who were fated to meet, to know one another intimately. — Audrey Carlan

Somewhere today in time, I died. Conscious of a love cruelly wronged, almost hearing the silent calls beaming from eternity, hearing the sounds of the sea waves breaking at my feet - beckoning me, and it is in those cries, deep inside my fated soul, deep in another life which brings me the allure of: destiny. — J.L. Holtz

My country is still in chains of bloody and terrorist fundamentalists. The situation in Afghanistan and conditions of its ill-fated women will never change positively, as long as the warlords are not disarmed and BOTH the pro-US and anti-US terrorists are removed from the political scene of Afghanistan — Malalai Joya

Maybe I am fated to always be alone, Tsukuru found himself thinking. People came to him, but in the end they always left. They came, seeking something, but either they couldn't find it, or were unhappy with what they found (or else they were disappointed or angry), and then they left. One day, without warning, they vanished, with no explanation, no word of farewell. Like a silent hatchet had sliced the ties between them, ties through which warm blood still flowed, along with a quiet pulse. — Haruki Murakami

I don't think unhappiness is fated. — Michelle Moran

I saw that all beings are fated to happiness: action is not life, but a way of wasting some force, an enervation. Morality is the weakness of the brain. — Arthur Rimbaud

What a fool she was ever to have imagined that there might be some place in the world where she could sink to the earth with the knowledge that there were people round her who understood, who perhaps even admired and loved her! She was fated to carry loneliness about with her as a leper carries his scabs. 'No one can do anything for me: no one can do anything against me. — Francois Mauriac

As long as humankind recklessly proceeds in the fateful delusion of being biologically fated for triumph, nothing essential will change. — Peter Wessel Zapffe

There are days when I am haunted by a feeling that is blacker than the blackest melancholy. I have a contempt for humanity. I despise the people I have been fated to call my contemporaries. I feel suffocated by their filthy breath. — Friedrich Nietzsche

She walked about with the rather fated expression you see in photographs of girls who have subsequently been murdered, but nothing had so far happened to her. — Elizabeth Bowen

Every life is a mystery. And every story of every life is a mystery. But it is not what happens that is the mystery. It is whether it has to happen no matter what, whether it is ordered and ordained, fixed and fated, or whether it can be missed, avoided, circumvented, passed by; that is the mystery.
If she had not come along the Via Piemonte that day, would it still have happened? If she had come along the Via Piemonte that day, but ten minutes later than she did, would it still have happened? Therein lies the real mystery. And no one ever knows, and no one ever will.
("For The Rest Of Her Life") — Cornell Woolrich

Here's an example. When I first met Nick Gautier it was fated that he was to get married at age thirty and have a dozen kids. As our friendship grew, I lost the ability to see how his future would play out. Then in one moment of anger, I changed his destiny by telling him he should kill himself. I didn't mean it, but as a god of fate, such proclamations when made by me are law. Fate realigned the circumstances around him that would lead him to make a decision to take his own life. The woman he was to marry ended up dead in her store. His mother's life was taken by a Daimon and Nick shot himself at her feet. My free will would have been to not lash out at him. Instead I did. His free will would have been to seek revenge as a human against a Daimon and not kill himself. But because of who I am, my proclamation that he kill himself outweighed his will and he didn't really have any choice. I took his free will and I cost him everyone who was close to him. (Acheron) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

Love affair. Doesn't that sound so middle-aged? And also ill-fated. Like ill-fated is an understood prefix to love affair. Well, ill-fated is fine, as long as it's a meaty and fraught ill-fated love affair, not a pale and insipid one. — Laini Taylor

I cannot save any man, for I too am a man. But if that is what is fated,
then perhaps I may be admitted, at least, to record death, to craft a morbid
history of observance that suggests the cycle of souls. I would make a proof
of lives ended and suffered. And so my chronicle of death began. — Kinoko Nasu

We might be able to see God's body in the Kabbalah's ten Sefirot, but it was 1986, barely forty years since our grandparents' generation sat desperate and fated in their East European neighborhoods. Never again, our teachers incanted to us Monday after Monday, Wednesday after Wednesday. But when I picture myself in those rooms in the basement of our shul, even now I can only hear the incantation's reciprocal: It will happen again. Beware. Be always aware. — Daniel Torday

The thin child knew enough fairy stories to know that a prohibition in a story is only there to be broken. The first humans were fated to eat the apple. The dice were loaded against them. The grandfather was pleased with himself. The thin child found no one in this story with whom to sympathise. Except maybe the snake, which had no asked to be made use of as a temper.
The snake wanted simply to coil about in the branches.
What was there in the beginning in the Asgard stories?
In the first age there was nothing. Nor sand, nor the sea, nor cold waves; there was no earth, no sky on high. The gulf galped and grass grew nowhere. — A.S. Byatt

The stars may place us in each other's paths-I dare say that everyone here has been a victim of some sort of celestial fate. Perhaps we were all fated to meet, to be here with each other, but it is up to us to decide to shine or not. The stars are not unreachable. They are not untouchable. And they do not control us. — Karina Halle

Apart from its ill-fated name and frightening body, everything about the crab as a creature is creepy. It only moves sideways. To the right and then jerking to the left. It always looks like it's trying to avoid an awkward situation. "Uh-oh. I owe that guy money," as he sidesteps away. — Jim Gaffigan

There's nothing fated in our stars. No meant-to-be in any of it. We are accidental people occupying an accidental planet in an accidental universe. And that's okay. These seven billion billion atoms are good with that. — Rick Yancey

In the three boats story, a man is floating alone in an ocean without a life jacket when a boat passes by. "Get in. I'll save you," the boatman says. "Oh, no, it's fine," the floating man answers, "I'm putting my faith in the Lord." In time, two more boats come along, and to each rescuer the man - usually me, in Wade's telling - says, "No, no, I'm putting my faith in the Lord." Eventually, and it isn't very long in coming, the man drowns. Yet when he stands up to meet his Maker at the fated spot where some rejoice but many more cower, his Maker looks sternly down and says, "You're a fool. You're assigned to hell forever. Go there now." To which the drowned man says, "But your honor, I put my faith in you. You promised to save me." "Save you!?" fearsome God shouts from misty marmoreal heights. "Save you? Save you?" God thunders. "I sent you three boats! — Richard Ford

But if fate won't be denied ... if it's set, how could there be infinite possibilities? (Kat)
Only certain aspects are fated. The outcome isn't. It was fated that Sin would loose his godhood. The means and what followed were determined by free will. Free will is that one scary variable that sets so much into motion that no one, not even I, have control over. (Acheron) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

All tragedies deal with fated meetings; how else could there be a play? Fate deals its stroke; sorrow is
purged, or turned to rejoicing; there is death, or triumph; there has been a meeting, and a change. No one
will ever make a tragedy-and that is as well, for one could not bear it-whose grief is that the principals
never met. — Mary Renault

The wild force of genius has often been fated by Nature to be finally overcome by quiet strength. The volcano sends up its red bolt with terrific force, as if it would strike the stars; but the calm, resistless hand of gravitation seizes it and brings it to the earth. — Peter Bayne

Real love is always fated. It has been arranged before time. It is the most meticulously prepared of coincidences. And fate, of course, is simply a secular term for the will of God, and coincidence for His grace. — Mike Mason