Hand Of Fate Quotes & Sayings

Here is your great soul - the man who has given himself over to Fate; on the other hand, that man is a weakling and a degenerate who struggles and maligns the order of the universe and would rather reform the gods than reform himself. — Seneca.

The interesting thing, in the photograph, was how the fragile little knock-kneed boy - smiling sweetly, pristine in his sailor suit - was also the old man who'd clasped my hand while he was dying: two separate frames, superimposed upon each other, of the same soul. And the painting, above his head, was the still point where it all hinged: dreams and signs, past and future, luck and fate. There wasn't a single meaning. There were many meanings. It was a riddle expanding out and out and out. — Donna Tartt

Quite clearly, Europe had come apart and millions had died not because of the shifting of great historical forces or the accidents of fate or destiny, the several bullets of Sarajevo, colonial competition, or anything else. It was because Orfeo had slipped from his seat in the office of the attorney Giuliani and been carried upon the flood, like a corked bottle full of shit, until he had lodged upon a platform at the Ministry of War, where his feverish hand and only half-innocent imagination had been directing the machinery of nations in homage to the exalted one and the holy blessed sap. — Mark Helprin

His fierce determination to escape an invalid's fate led him to transform his body and timid demeanor through strenuous work; Taft, on the other hand, blessed from birth with robust health, would allow his physical strength and energy to gradually dissipate over the years into a state of obesity. — Doris Kearns Goodwin

(C)hoice without alternative is only a sleight of hand; it is a magician's force-play, during which you believe you have free well, but your fate has already been decided: the magician knows which card you will pick! — Garth Stein

Heav'n from all creatures hides the book of Fate,
All but the page prescrib'd, their present state;
From brutes what men, from men what spirits know:
Or who could suffer Being here below?
The lamb thy riot dooms to bleed to-day,
Had he thy Reason, would he skip and play?
Pleas'd to the last, he crops the flow'ry food,
And licks the hand just rais'd to shed his blood.
Oh blindness to the future! kindly giv'n,
That each may fill the circle mark'd by Heav'n;
Who sees with equal eye, as God of all,
A hero perish, or a sparrow fall. — Alexander Pope

Fate was not kind, life was capricious and terrible, and there was no good or reason in nature. But there is good and reason in us, in human beings, with whom fortune plays, and we can be stronger than nature and fate, if only for a few hours. And we can draw close to one another in times of need, and live to comfort each other.

And sometimes when the black depths are silent, we can do even more. We can then be gods for moments, stretch out a commanding hand and create things which were not there before and which, when they are created, continue to live without us. Out of sounds, words and other frail and worthless things, we can construct playthings--songs and poems full of meaning, consolation and goodness, more beautiful and enduring than the grim sport of fortune and destiny. — Hermann Hesse

The clock had been Sylvie's, and her mother's before that. It had gone to Ursula on Sylvie's death and Ursula had left it to Teddy, and so it had zigzagged its way down the family tree ...
... The clock was a good one, made by Frodsham and worth quite a bit, but Teddy knew if he gave it to Viola she would sell it or misplace it or break it and it seemed important to him that it stayed in the family. An heirloom. ('Lovely word,' Bertie said.) He liked to think that the little golden key that wound it, a key that would almost certainly be lost by Viola, would continue to be turned by the hand of someone who was part of the family, part of his blood. The red thread. — Kate Atkinson

If there's any business that instructs you in the strong hand of fate, it's show business. You can plan and plan, but it's what happens to you that really determines what your career will be like. — Sam Waterston

Physically he was tired and his body relaxed throughout its entire length; his mind was in much the same state, floating free, detached, as though he had taken his old favourite, the tincture of laudanum. He felt no particular anxiety. The attempt must either succeed or fail: he hoped with all his heart for success, but 'all his heart' did not amount to a great deal now that some essential part of its core seemed to have died. Yet on the other hand he felt more able to command success in that it meant no less to him - to command it with a strength that arose not from a fundamental indifference to his own fate but from something resembling it that he could not define; it had a resemblance to despair, but a despair long past, with the horror taken out of it. — Patrick O'Brian

The lines of fate on my hand, once so bright, faded into echo.
The memory of his face in my dreams, once so luminous passed into shadow. — Farrah Naseem

Margaret Fuller Slack I WOULD have been as great as George Eliot But for an untoward fate. For look at the photograph of me made by Penniwit, Chin resting on hand, and deep - set eyes - Gray, too, and far-searching. But there was the old, old problem: Should it be celibacy, matrimony or unchastity? Then John Slack, the rich druggist, wooed me, Luring me with the promise of leisure for my novel, And I married him, giving birth to eight children, And had no time to write. It was all over with me, anyway, When I ran the needle in my hand While washing the baby's things, And died from lock - jaw, an ironical death. Hear me, ambitious souls, Sex is the curse of life. — Edgar Lee Masters

Happiness, you see, its just an illusion of Fate, a heavenly sleight of hand designed to make you believe in fairy tales. But there's no happily ever after. You'll only find happy endings in books. Some books. — Ellen Hopkins

We unthinkingly build the pilings of our lives upon whatever comes along. Like it or not, we play the hand that fate deals us. If fate is kind, some people credit their fortuitous circumstances to their ingenuity and resoluteness. If fate is cruel, some people curse God. The truth is that an unenlightened person resists suffering, they continually wish for a world different than it is, whereas an enlightened person learns how to suffer heroically. — Kilroy J. Oldster

If I can believe believe that the heavens have blessed me with a tiger-spirited daughter, then how can I doubt the existence of a Dragon Musado?" he said.

Kira didn't know how to react to her father's words.

"I believe that one person can change the world. Whether he is the Musado or a girl with a tiger spirit. The monks teach that we mere mortals cannot question fate. But I say that we control destiny by our every action. Our power lies in the choices we make." Her father placed his warm hand on her cheek. "In the choices you make. Remember, stay true to yourself and do what your heart tells you is right, and not what is easy. — Ellen Oh

But if, on the other hand, our theory should allow that a book may well be a revelation in spite of errors and passions and deliberate human composition, if only it be a true record of the inner experiences of great-souled persons wrestling with the crises of their fate, then the verdict would be much more favorable. — William James

Our combined beauty," Callie says seriously, hand pressed against her chest, "was too much for even a god to bear all at once."

Lyons, Heather (2013-11-17). A Matter of Heart (Fate Series Book 2) (p. 128). Cerulean Books. Kindle Edition. — Heather Lyons

What's the Future? It's a blank sheet of paper, and we draw lines on it, but sometimes our hand is held, and the lines we draw aren't the lines we wanted. — John Marsden

So there is more to their stance than a wistful yearning for acceptance in a world they never made. Their real motivation is an instinctive certainty as to what the score really is. They are out of the ballgame and they know it. Unlike the campus rebels, who with a minimum amount of effort will emerge from their struggle with a validated ticket to status, the outlaw motorcyclist views the future with the baleful eye of a man with no upward mobility at all. In a world increasingly geared to specialists, technicians and fantastically complicated machinery, the Hell's Angels are obvious losers and it bugs them. But instead of submitting quietly to their collective fate, they have made it the basis of a full-time social vendetta. They don't expect to win anything, but on the other hand, they have nothing to lose. If — Hunter S. Thompson

Danger cups us under its hand, and we can do nothing but stand witness to the turning of the world. Here we walk on the balancing line between futures. Humanity always believes it decides the fate of the whole world, and so it does, but never in the moment that it thinks it does. — Robin Hobb

He grinned again. We'd only been seeing each other for a few weeks now, but this easy give-and-take still surprised me. From that very first day in my room, I felt like we'd somehow skipped the formalities of the Beginning of a Relationship: those awkward moments when you're not all over each other and are still feeling out the other person's boundaries and limits. Maybe this was because we'd been circling each other for a while before he finally catapulted through my window. But if I let myself think about it much - and I didn't - I had flashes of realising that I'd been comfortable with him even at the very start. Clearly, he'd been comfortable with me, grabbing my hand as he had that first day. As if he knew, even then, that we'd be here now. — Sarah Dessen

There are good people who are dealt a bad hand by fate, and bad people who live long, comfortable, privileged lives. A small twist of fate can save or end a life; random chance is a permanent, powerful player in each of our lives, and in human history as well. — Jeff Greenfield

So we go, so little knowing what we touch and what touches us as we talk! We drop out a common piece of news, "Mr. So-and-so is dead, Miss Such-a-one is married, such a ship has sailed," and lo, on our right hand or on our left, some heart has sunk under the news silently - gone down in the great ocean of Fate, without even a bubble rising to tell its drowning pang. And this - God help us! - is what we call living! — Harriet Beecher Stowe

You must know that I do not love and that I love you,
because everything alive has its two sides;
a word is one wing of silence,
fire has its cold half.
I love you in order to begin to love you,
to start infinity again
and never to stop loving you:
that's why I do not love you yet.
I love you, and I do not love you, as if I held
keys in my hand: to a future of joy-
a wretched, muddled fate-
My love has two lives, in order to love you.
-Sonnet XLIV — Pablo Neruda

...the belief that the threat of rape is everywhere, that it can happen at any time, that it is the worst fate that can befall women, is enough to make us police ourselves and restrict our own mobility. But on the other hand, feminists also want to demystify rape, to begin to see it not as a unique and life-destroying form of violation from which one can never recover, but as (merely) another kind of violence against person. — Nivedita Menon

A prince is also respected when he is either a true friend or a downright enemy, that to say, when, without any reservation, he declares himself in favour of one party against the other; which course will always be more advantageous than standing neutral; because if two of your powerful neighbours come to blows, they are of such a character that, if one of them conquers, you have either to fear him or not. In either case it will always be more advantageous for you to declare yourself and to make war strenuously; because, in the first case, if you do not declare yourself, you will invariably fall a prey to the conqueror, to the pleasure and satisfaction of him who has been conquered, and you will have no reasons to offer, nor anything to protect or to shelter you. Because he who conquers does not want doubtful friends who will not aid him in the time of trial; and he who loses will not harbour you because you did not willingly, sword in hand, court his fate. — Niccolo Machiavelli

No one is accountable for existing at all, or for being constituted as he is, or for living in the circumstances and surroundings in which he lives. The fatality of his nature cannot be disentangled from the fatality of all that which has been and will be. He is not the result of a special design, a will, a purpose; he is not the subject of an attempt to attain an 'ideal of man' or an 'ideal of happiness' or an 'ideal of morality'
it is absurd to want to hand over his nature to some purpose or other. We invented the concept 'purpose': in reality purpose is lacking ... One is necessary, one is a piece of fate, one belongs to the whole, one is in the whole
there exists nothing which could judge, measure, compare, condemn our being, for that would be to judge, measure, condemn the whole ... — Friedrich Nietzsche

Members of a powerful group are raised to believe (however illogically) that whatever affects it will also affect them. On theother hand, members of less powerful groups are raised to believe (however illogically) that each individual can escape the group's fate. Thus, cohesion is encouraged on the one hand, and disunity is fostered on the other. — Gloria Steinem

Mere children, ha!" said Jane. "I say we tie up the knave and then discuss his fate."
Since everyone thought this a good idea, Batty and Hound donated Jeffrey's neckties, and soon Bug Man, aka Sock or Spock, aka Norman Birnbaum, was bound hand and foot. Jane, Batty, and Hound then took a few minutes to be Aztec priests calling for blood, until Rosalind quieted them down. Norman was slime, but that was no reason to terrify him.
Then came a long discussion about what they should do next... Jane's suggestion of throwing Norman into their basement so that he could dwell on his sins was rejected outright. — Jeanne Birdsall

It's certainly nice to have my options open." He looked back out at the city. "Can this possibly work, Mister Brekker? Or am I risking the fate of Ravka and the world's Grisha on the honor and abilities of a fast-talking urchin?"
"More than a bit of both," said Kaz. "You're risking a country. We're risking our lives. Seems a fair trade."
The king of Ravka offered his hand. "The deal is the deal?"
"The deal is the deal."
They shook.
"If only treaties could be signed so quickly," he said, his easy privateer's mien sliding back in place like a mask purchased on West Stave. "I'm going to have a drink and a bath. One can take only so much mud and squalor. As the rebel said to the prince, it's bad for the constitution."
He flicked an invisible speck of dust from his lapel and sauntered out of the solarium. — Leigh Bardugo

Frodo: 'It's a pity Bilbo didn't kill Gollum when he had the chance.'
Gandalf: 'Pity? It's a pity that stayed Bilbo's hand. Many that live deserve death. Some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them, Frodo? Do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. Even the very wise cannot see all ends. My heart tells me that Gollum has some part to play in it, for good or evil, before this is over. The pity of Bilbo may rule the fate of many.' Frodo: 'I wish the Ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened.'
Gandalf: 'So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us. There are other forces at work in this world, Frodo, besides that of evil. Bilbo was meant to find the Ring, in which case you were also meant to have it. And that is an encouraging thought. — J.R.R. Tolkien

Your voice is yours, how dare you let another speak for you.
Your heart is yours, how dare you give it away, so freely to another you hardly know.
Your soul is yours, how dare you ignore its instinctual truth.
Your mind is yours, don't let the world make it negative.
You are the master of your fate, you are the creator of your destiny, don't hand the keys to anyone, rather open the door and welcome them to taste your paradise within. — Nikki Rowe

Yet the greatest impact of the rise of great gods was not on sheep or demons, but upon the status of Homo sapiens. Animists thought that humans were just one of many creatures inhabiting the world. Polytheists, on the other hand, increasingly saw the world as a reflection of the relationship between gods and humans. Our prayers, our sacrifices, our sins and our good deeds determined the fate of the entire ecosystem. A terrible flood might wipe out billions of ants, grasshoppers, turtles, antelopes, giraffes and elephants, just because a few stupid Sapiens made the gods angry. Polytheism thereby exalted not only the status of the gods, but also that of humankind. Less fortunate members of the old animist system lost their stature and became either extras or silent decor in the great drama of man's relationship with the gods. — Yuval Noah Harari

love America for the clear idea behind the cloudy reality. Without the idea, the joys of America would be mere accident, the ephemera tossed up by the hand of fate, to disappear in the wind. And what is that idea? It is the idea of hope, that grand, audacious idea that makes the Britisher blush with embarrassment. — Zia Haider Rahman

Their lives revolved around evil acts; some within their control, and some not. Some of them weren't born with the capacity for kindness, and others found it better to spare no compassion for anyone in this cruel world because they felt none would be given to them. Fate deals a bad hand to some folks. Some people are just doomed to be no good. — Ramsey Isler

I can't help but imagine what that would be like - to be all alone on this island with eternity taunting me with loneliness. To say goodbye to the last human you will ever see - there is no crueler hand of fate. — Jennifer Arnett

Dancing in the dark. Does fortune wait or just the black hand of fate, It'll take your God filled soul. Fill it with devils. — Bruce Springsteen

You held out your hand for an egg, and fate put into it a scorpion. Show no consternation: close your fingers firmly upon the gift; let it sting through your palm. Never mind: in time after your hand and arm have swelled and quivered long with torture, the squeezed scorpion will die, and you will have learned the great lesson how to endure without a sob. For the whole remnant of your life, if you survive the test - some it is said, die under it - you will be stronger, wiser, less sensitive. — Charlotte Bronte

The wheel of the Good Law moves swiftly on. It grinds by night and day. The worthless husks it drives from out the golden grain, the refuse from the flour. The hand of fate guides the wheel; the revolutions mark the beatings of the heart of manifestation. — H. P. Blavatsky

This person sees not her own hand depositing the next dollar in a slot machine, but the hand of fate, or God. It's her true conviction that there are forces at work for her to win a large jackpot - or at least to win back the money lost.
After all, the only-for-show pictures of fruit had almost aligned with one another the last couple spins. — John-Talmage Mathis

As one of the German employees of the WIC in Brazil noted, "the Jews, more than anyone else, were in a desperate situation and therefore, preferred to die sword in hand than face their fate under the Portuguese yoke: the flames."32 The Amsterdam Jews showed their support of the Jews in Brazil by helping to finance a privateering campaign that captured approximately 220 Portuguese vessels, effectively imposing a blockade on — Jeffrey Gorsky

Our fate is matched by the total freedom we have to react to our fate. It is as if we were dealt a hand of card. Once we have them, we are free to play them as we choose. — Thomas Sowell

In modern times, the sisters have largely disappeared from the collective consciousness, but the idea of Fate hasn't. Why do we still believe? Does it make tragedy more bearable to believe that we ourselves had no hand in it, that we couldn't have prevented it? It was always ever thus.

Things happen for a reason, says Natasha's mother. What she means is Fate has a Reason and, though you may not know it, there's a certain comfort in knowing that there's a Plan.

Natasha is different. She believes in determinism- cause and effect. One action leads to another leads to another. Your actions determine your fate. In this way she's not unlike Daniel's dad.

Daniel lives in the nebulous space in between. Maybe he wasn't meant to meet Natasha today. Maybe it was random chance after all.

But.

Once they met, the rest of it, the love between them, was inevitable. — Nicola Yoon

Every hour be firmly resolved ... to accomplish the work at hand with fitting and unaffected dignity, goodwill, freedom, justice. Banish from your thoughts all other considerations. This is possible if you perform each act as if it were your last, rejecting every frivolous distraction, every denial of the rule of reason, every pretentious gesture, vain show, and whining complaint against the decrees of fate. Do you see what little is required of a man to live a well-tempered and god-fearing life? Obey these precepts, and the gods will ask nothing more (II.5). — Marcus Aurelius

After a certain period of time, when I had acquired more insight into the Fuehrer's personality, I gave him my hand and said: "I unite my fate with yours for better or for worse: I dedicate myself to you in good times and in bad, even unto death." I really meant it-and still do. — Hermann Goring

On the other hand the machine does not bleed, ache, hang for hours in the empty sky in a torment of hope to learn the fate of another machine, nor does it cry out with joy nor dance in the air with the fierce passion of a bird. — Loren Eiseley

By revealing to Tomas her dream about jabbing needles under her fingernails, Tereza unwittingly revealed that she had gone through his desk. If Tereza had been any other woman, Tomas would never have spoken to her again. Aware of that, Tereza said to him, Throw me out! But instead of throwing her out, he seized her hand and kissed the tips of her fingers, because at that moment he himself felt the pain under her fingernails as surely as if the nerves of her fingers led straight to his own brain.
Anyone who has failed to benefit from the Devil's gift of compassion (co-feeling) will condemn Tereza coldly for her deed, because privacy is sacred and drawers containing intimate correspondence are not to be opened. But because compassion was Tomas's fate (or curse), he felt that he himself had knelt before the open desk drawer, unable to tear his eyes from Sabina's letter. He understood Tereza, and not only was he incapable of being angry with her, he loved her all the more. — Milan Kundera

,m./But it is precisely at those moments when the glass seems to be 'set fair' that Fate invariably decides to take a hand. — John Bude

The hand of fate had dipped into the ragbag of humanity. — Jean Shepherd

In wrapping things up the writer had a choice: the "happy" ending in which the two former enemies are rescued and we can imagine them going forward with their lives as friends the "realistic" ending in which they are rescued but immediately resume their quarrel: or the cruelly ironic ending where fate takes a hand.
The class was about evenly divided among the three endings. For Me though there was no choice the writer absolutely had to go with the ironic one. What would be the point I argued of a story like that with a happy ending The two men walking off into the sunset together and unharmed isnt an ending-it's a cop-out. — Michael D. Beil

True love, selfless and deep as the oceans in their most fathomless depths." Orlando let the glove run along the thread, which glistened like a ray of sunlight. "But I fear this one is not meant for me. This kind of thread is not spun in mere days."
He let his hand drop, and the gold disappeared as though it really had been nothing but a ray of sunlight. "The Golden Yarn ... or the inseverable bond, as it is also called. As inseverable as the threads of fate. And there is only one who can spin them and who can cut them. — Cornelia Funke

I've been thrown into a turbulent triangle, but even though I have deep feelings for Shiray doesn't mean my feelings will disappear for Melanie immediately. Fate has really dealt me a cruel hand of cards. — B. Truly

But it had happened. I had followed Delia's van that night, I had told Wes my Truths, I had stepped into his arms, showing him my raw, broken heart. I could pretend otherwise, pushing it out of sight and hopefully out of mind. But if something was really important, fate made sure it somehow came back to you and gave you another chance. I'd gotten one reaching out to grab Kristy's hand as she pulled me into the ambulance; another during the trip to the hospital that ended with seeing Avery born. Events conspired to bring you back to where you'd been. It was what you did then that made all the difference: it was all about potential. — Sarah Dessen

Will picked a single blossom from a gorse bush beside him; it shone bright yellow on his grubby hand. "People are very complicated," he said sadly.
"So they are," John Rowlands said. His voice deepened a little, louder and clearer than it had been. "But when the battles between you and your adversaries are done, Will Stanton, in the end the fate of all the world will depend on just those people, and on how many of them are good or bad, stupid or wise. And indeed it is all so complicated that I would not dare foretell what they will do with their world. Our world. — Susan Cooper

Plume"

Transfixed to the, by the, on the congruities, who is herself a vanishing point coming to closure - dusky flutter - trilling away like a watchdog on drugged sop, channeling her mother and grandmother who've engraved on her locket phrases in script: "glide on a blade" and "rustling precedes the shuck." This is not my teeming fate, my rind, my roiling ellipsis or valedictory spray of myrrh. Always it's morning, afternoon or evening - the loot of hours - a magic sack grasping vacuum but heavy in the hand, and from which, together, we pull a swarm of telepathic bees, melons beached in a green bin, a lithograph of the city from its crumbling ramparts, crackled pitchers and the mouth of a cave. Perhaps this is my open weave, my phantom rialto or plume of light. We bow to each other in the mash of flickering things. We are completely surrounded. — Aaron Shurin

Kat turned back to Hale. "The Mary Poppins?"
"Seemed like a good idea at the time."
"Oh. Yeah. Obviously. Just so we're clear, this master plan of yours ... "
"Might have a couple kinks to work through," Hale admitted, then reached for her hand. As soon as he touched her, Kat knew there was no such thing as curses. People make and break their own fortunes-they are the masters of their own fate. And right then Kat wouldn't have changed a thing.
She kissed him, quick and feather soft.
"What was that for?" he asked.
Kat placed her fingers on his face and brought his forehead close to hers, touching as she whispered, "For luck. — Ally Carter

Then the prophetess said to the witcher: "I shall give you this advice: wear boots made of iron, take
in hand a staff of steel. Then walk until the end of the world. Help yourself with your staff to break the land before you and wet it with your tears. Go through fire and water, do not stop along the way,
do not look behind you. And when the boots are worn, when your staff is blunt, once the wind and the heat has dried your eyes so that your tears no longer flow, then at the end of the world you may
find what you are looking for and what you love...

The witcher went through fire and water, he did not look back. He did not take iron boots or a staff
of steel. He took only his sword. He did not listen to the words of prophets. And he did well because she was a bad prophet. — Andrzej Sapkowski

As fate is inexorable, and not to be moved either with tears or reproaches, an excess of sorrow is as foolish as profuse laughter; while, on the other hand, not to mourn at all is insensibility. — Seneca The Younger

It was not chance that brought us together again. I am sure of that. These things are predestined. I have a theory that each man's life is like a pack of cards, and those we meet and sometimes love are shuffled with us. We find ourselves in the same suit, held by the hand of Fate. The game is played, we are discarded, and pass on. — Daphne Du Maurier

What do the contours of your body mean, laid out like the lines on a hand, so that I no longer see them except as fate? — Rainer Maria Rilke

The glories of our blood and state
Are shadows, not substantial things;
There is no armor against Fate.
Death lays his icy hand on kings ... — James Shirley

When you go against the flow of nature and betray the spiritual laws existing within, there is, and always will be, a negative reaction. Those who try escaping life before fate shakes their hand, will forever be stuck on earth, chained to the place they so badly wanted to leave. What a complicated misery. I guarantee you it will be torture to be invisible and ignored by those you love when you can see them - but you are already dead for them to hear you utter another word. Talk about agony, more so, than remaining on this plane and continuing your spiritual cycle as it was written to be lived. — Suzy Kassem

Each one of us must in the end choose for himself how far he would like to leave our collective fate to the wayward vagaries of popular assemblies For myself it would be most irksome to be ruled by a bevy of Platonic Guardians, even if I knew how to choose them, which I assuredly do not I should miss the stimulus of living in a society where I have, at least theoretically, some part in the direction of public affairs. — Learned Hand

Do you dislike Children? I ask, entertained at the little one's cleverness in dodging capture attempts.
"I don't dislike them, nor do I like them. I've never understood why one must love children simply because they are children. I don't love people because they are people; in fact, I rarely like any people at all. If a child is somehow deserving of admiration, I certainly won't deny it, but why hand it out like candy on Queen's Day?"
I laugh, surprising him.
"Do you think me terribly cruel, then?"
"Actually, I agree. It is another great fault of mine my mother endeavored to correct. Children in general I've never cared for, though individual children I love very much."
-Quote from "Illusions of Fate" by Kiersten White p.17 — Kiersten White

There are times in your life when things line up and Fate takes a hand in your future," Ptolemy remembered Coydog saying. "When that happens, you got to move quick and take advantage of the sitchiation or you'll never know what might have been."
"How do I know when it's time to move quick?" L'il Pea asked.
"When somethin' big happens and then somethin' else come up. — Walter Mosley

Fate with impartial hand turns out the doom of high and low; her capacious urn is constantly shaking the names of all mankind. — Horace

The fate of the Empire rests on this enterprise. Every man must devote himself totally to the task in hand. — Isoroku Yamamoto

That was a matter suspended between heaven and earth, awaiting the hand of destiny. — Paulo Coelho

I don't discount a magical hand of fate. I am an actor, after all, and a Shakespearian, no less. But it can't be the ruling force of your life. You have to be the driver. — Gayle Forman

The time is now near at hand which must probably determine whether Americans are to be freemen or slaves; whether they are to have any property they can call their own; whether their houses and farms are to be pillaged and destroyed, and themselves consigned to a state of wretchedness from which no human efforts will deliver them. The fate of unborn millions will now depend, under God, on the courage and conduct of this army. Our cruel and unrelenting enemy leaves us only the choice of brave resistance, or the most abject submission. We have, therefore, to resolve to conquer or die. — George Washington

Animists thought that humans were just one of many creatures inhabiting the world. Polytheists, on the other hand, increasingly saw the world as a reflection of the relationship between gods and humans. Our prayers, our sacrifices, our sins and our good deeds determined the fate of the entire ecosystem. A terrible flood might wipe out billions of ants, grasshoppers, turtles, antelopes, giraffes and elephants, just because a few stupid Sapiens made the gods angry. Polytheism thereby exalted not only the status of the gods, but also that of humankind. — Yuval Noah Harari

Out of despair I decided to follow this horror through. I stared down at what I was already grasping in my hand, like an ape; I wrapped myself in the dust and took off my trousers.
Interwoven joy and terror strangled me within. I strangled and I gasped from pleasure. The more those pictures terrified me, the more intense was my excitement at the sight of them. After days of accumulating alarms, tensions, suffocations, I was beyond withstanding my own ignominy. I invoked it and I blessed it. It was my inevitable fate: my joy was all the greater since, with regard to life, I had long since entrenched myself in an attitude of suffering, and now, in the throes of delight, I progressed even farther into vileness and degradation. — Georges Bataille

Sternly, remorselessly, fate guides each of us; only at the beginning, when we're absorbed in details, in all sorts of nonsense, in ourselves, are we unaware of its harsh hand. — Ivan Turgenev

Life is not a matter of choices! Life is handed to you, a couple of cards that have cycled through the grimy hands of hundreds of players before you. There are no aces hidden up your sleeve. There is no shortcut to success and happiness. Sleight of hand will only earn you a bloody nose and a thrashing in the alley outback. So instead, you play the few good cards you have and do what you can with the bad, and you play fair. There is no choice. — Kelseyleigh Reber

Then take me disappearin' through the smoke rings of my mind,
Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves,
The haunted, frightened trees, out to the windy beach,
Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow.
Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free,
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands,
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves,
Let me forget about today until tomorrow. — Bob Dylan

She cannot escape marriage; it is her sacred Hindu duty, just as giving her away in marriage was her father's sacred Hindu duty. Like Indian Independence, marriage is her ultimate 'Tryst with Destiny,' and it is not in her hand to escape her preordained and compulsory fate. A marriageable daughter is the lowest common denominator in the giant scheme of things. — Chandana Roy

One of those cases where you couldn't just fold. God, across the table of Fate, was picking His nose, scratching His ear, laying on tells with a prodigal hand, it had to mean something, and a faulty guess would be better than none. — Thomas Pynchon

If love were the only thing, I
would follow you - in rags, if need be - to the world's end; for you hold
my heart in the hollow of your hand! But is love the only thing?
I know people write and talk as if it were. Perhaps, for some, Fate lets
it be. Ah, if I were one of them! But if love had been the only thing, you
would have let the King die in his cell.
Honour binds a woman too, Rudolf. My honour lies in being true to
my country and my House. I don't know why God has let me love you;
but I know that I must stay. — Anthony Hope

A breeze ruffled the neat hedges of Privet Drive, which lay silent and tidy under the inky sky, the very last place you would expect astonishing things to happen. Harry Potter rolled over inside his blankets without waking up. One small hand closed on the letter beside him and he slept on, not knowing he was special, not knowing he was famous, not knowing he would be woken in a few hours' time by Mrs. Dursley's scream as she opened the front door to put out the milk bottles, nor that he would spend the next few weeks being prodded and pinched by his cousin Dudley ... He couldn't know that at this very moment, people meeting in secret all over the country were holding up their glasses and saying in hushed voices: To Harry Potter - the boy who lived! — J.K. Rowling

Now, while watching these two mini-you's, I want you to see that as dysfunctional as they may be, both of them are essentially good. The Dictator wants you to be healthy and beautiful. It gets frantic about your weight for the same reason you might freak out if you saw a beloved pet wandering into traffic. It screams and yells, pens you in or drags you around - anything to keep you from a horrible fat fate. On the other hand, the Wild Child is the part of you that evolved to avoid starvation and captivity. It panics when the Dictator berates, shames, and tries to control it. It knows the Dictator is planning to starve it. So it's not surprising that the instant the Dictator is weakened by stress, hunger, or environmental chaos, the Wild Child leaps into action and eats like a junkyard dog. — Martha N. Beck

Character is fate, the Greeks believed. A hundred years of German philosophy went into the making of this decision in which the seed of self-destruction lay embedded, waiting for its hour. The voice was Schlieffen's, but the hand was the hand of Fichte who saw the German people chosen by Providence to occupy the supreme place in the history of the universe, of Hegel who saw them leading the world to a glorious destiny of compulsory Kultur, of Nietzsche who told them that Supermen were above ordinary controls, of Treitschke who set the increase of power as the highest moral duty of the state, of the whole German people, who called their temporal ruler the "All-Highest." What made the Schlieffen plan was not Clausewitz and the Battle of Cannae, but the body of accumulated egoism which suckled the German people and created a nation fed on "the desperate delusion of the will that deems itself absolute." The — Barbara W. Tuchman

The 'experimental' writer, then, is simply following the story's commands to the best of his human ability. The writer is not the story, the story is the story. See? Sometimes this is very hard to accept and sometimes too easy. On the one hand, there's the writer who can't face his fate: that the telling of a story has nothing at all to do with him; on the other hand, there's the one who faces it too well: that the telling of the story has nothing at all to do with him — Thomas Ligotti

One must always say every word with consideration, and should not say what one does not wish to happen. Those who do not understand the value of suggestion walk after their own fate with a whip in their hand, and those who understand its value and control their word and use it rightly, they are a bliss to themselves and a source of happiness to others. — Hazrat Inayat Khan

Bishop Berkeley destroyed this world in one volume octavo; and nothing remained, after his time, but mind; which experienced a similar fate from the hand of Mr. Hume in 1737. — Sydney Smith

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

Cam held her closer. "Marry me, Amelia. You're what I want. You're my fate." One hand slid to the back of her head, gripping the braids and ribbons to keep her mouth upturned. "Say yes." He nibbled at her lips, licked at them, opened them. He kissed her until she writhed in his arms, her pulse racing. "Say it, Amelia, and save me from ever having to spend a night with another woman. I'll sleep indoors. I'll get a haircut. God help me, I think I'd even carry a pocket watch if it pleased you. — Lisa Kleypas

As a mark of gratitude for his previous patronage, and a slight super-added morsel after breakfast, put likewise into his hand a whale! The great fish, reversing his experience with the prophet of Nineveh, immediately began his progress down the same red pathway of fate whiter so varied a caravan had preceded him. — Nathaniel Hawthorne

I am the love, the pain, the intensity
I am the remnants of a banished plea;
I am the trivialized doors of a jubilant home
I am the shadows of an abandoned dome;
I am the instinct, the bizarre sound
I am the fate of a trampled mound;
I am the words half-heard when half-said
I am the memories of a longing thread;
I am the anarchist in disdain,
I am the bewilderment of an orphan pain;
I am your hand, I am the bar
I am the bellicosity of our resilient scar;
I am the love, the pain, the intensity
I am the predicament of the silent sea. — Ashfaq Saraf

What's the matter? Can't hear what I'm saying about you?" He raised a dark eyebrow at her. "Well, for starters, I hope this gray horse of mine reaches over and takes a big bite out of your thigh. And I hope it's painful as heck and you need my help, because I'll never again help you." He rested the hand holding the reins on his thigh, as though tempting fate. "You know, Aunt Ruth said she never met a man she didn't like, but she never met you. I'll bet you would try her good Quaker soul to its further limits. — Kit Dee

Cooking professionally is a dominant act, at all times about control. Eating well, on the other hand, is about submission. It's about giving up all vestiges of control, about entrusting
your fate entirely to someone else. It's about turning off the mean, manipulative, calculating, and shrewd person inside you, and slipping heedlessly into a new experience as if it were a
warm bath. It's about shutting down the radar and letting good things happen. Let it happen to you. — Anthony Bourdain

Then might I exemplify how an influence beyond our control lays its strong hand on every deed which we do, and weaves its consequences into an iron tissue of necessity. (Wakefield) — Nathaniel Hawthorne

A strong belief in fate is the worst kind of slavery; on the other hand, there is a comfort in the thought that God will be moved by our prayers. — Epicurus

How had it happened that when choosing the men and women who were to be torn from this subjugated plain, the hand of destiny had stayed so far inland, away from the busy coastlines, to alight on the people who were, of all, the most stubbornly rooted in the silt of the Ganga, in a soil that had to be sown with suffering to yield its crop of story and song? It was as if fate had thrust its fist through the living flesh of the land in order to tear away a piece of its stricken heart. — Amitav Ghosh

Then he clambered into the boat. Oh, and the beauty of the subjection of his loins, white and dimly luminous as he climbed over the side of the boat, his back rounded and soft -ah this was too much for her, too final a vision. She knew it and it was fatal. The terrible hopelessness of fate, and of beauty, such beauty!
He was not like a man to her, he was an incarnation, a great phase of life. She saw him press the water out of his face, and look at the bandage on his hand. And she knew it was all no good, and she would never go beyond him, he was the final approximation of life to her. — D.H. Lawrence

The fate of peoples is made like this, two men in small rooms. Forget the coronations, the conclaves of cardinals, the pomp and processions. This is how the world changes: a counter pushed across a table, a pen stroke that alters the force of a phrase, a woman's sigh as she passes and leaves on the air a trail of orange flower or rose water; her hand pulling close the bed curtain, the discreet sigh of flesh against flesh. — Hilary Mantel

The notion of fate and destiny is a very Greek concept. Working in the theater you do think a lot about that, because as a storyteller you do think, 'At what point was this always going to happen and what part have I got a hand in being able to change things?' — Cate Blanchett

O Liberty, white Goddess! is it well to leave the gates unguarded? On thy breast fold Sorrow's children, soothe the hurts of Fate, lift the down-trodden, but with hand of steel stay those who to thy sacred portals come to waste the gifts of Freedom. — Thomas Bailey Aldrich

I was a crazy creature with a head full of carnival spangles until I was thirty, and then the only man I ever really cared for stopped waiting and married someone else. So in spite, in anger at myself, I told myself I deserved my: fate for not having married when the best chance was at hand. I started traveling. My luggage was snowed under blizzards of travel stickers. I have been alone in Paris, alone in Vienna, alone in London, and all in all, it is very much like being alone in Green Town, Illinois. It is, in essence, being alone. Oh, you have plenty of time to think, improve your manners, sharpen your conversations. But I sometimes think I could easily trade a verb tense or a curtsy for some company that would stay over for a thirty-year weekend. — Ray Bradbury

Might have a couple of kinks to work through, Hale admitted then reached for her hand. As soon as he touched her, Kat knew there was no such thing as curses. People make and break their own fortunes
they are the masters of their own fate. And right then Kat wouldn't have changed a thing. — Ally Carter

A brief short story may require only a few paragraphs after the climax. On the other hand, in his massive novel 'The World According to Garp,' John Irving's denouement consisted of 10 separate sections, each devoted to an individual character's fate and each almost a story in itself. — Nancy Kress