Quotes about fate

How strange it is, he thought, how so many senseless things shape our destiny. For the rifle range had been a senseless thing, as senseless as a billiard table or a game of cards — designed for one thing only, to please the keeper of the station. And yet the hours he'd spent there had shaped toward this hour and end, to this single instant on this restricted slope of ground.

Destiny was apparently a word describing an individual’s desperate need for certainty.

Because I had sought to challenge Destiny, Destiny had taken vengeance.

“I would be grateful if I was allowed to work out my own destiny for once,” I said. “For good or ill.”

“I think you serve a great purpose, Hawkmoon. I think your destiny is a noble one.”

Hawkmoon laughed. “And yet I do not pine for a noble destiny—merely a secure one.”

For a moment, in that dark Dorset night, reason and science dissolved; life was a dark machine, a sinister astrology, a verdict at birth and without appeal, a zero over all.

Cass Mastern lived for a few years and in that time he learned that the world is all of one piece. He learned that the world is like an enormous spider web and if you touch it however lightly, at any point, the vibration ripples to the remotest perimeter and the drowsy spider feels the tingle and is drowsy no more but springs out to fling the gossamer coils about you who have touched the web and then inject the black, numbing poison under your hide. It does not matter whether or not you meant to brush the web of things. Your happy foot or your gay wing may have brushed it ever so lightly, but what happens always happens and there is the spider, bearded black and with his great faceted eyes glittering like mirrors in the sun, or like God's eye, and the fangs dripping.

Fate is not an eagle, it creeps like a rat.

Che serà, serà:

What will be, shall be.

That's the thing about your destiny: how are you supposed to know it when it arrives? How are you supposed to recognise it from the random life?

God has given to all things their course and decided how high and how far they may go, not higher, not lower.

[...] even if we hadn't met that day, my life might not have been any different. We had met that day because we were supposed to meet. If we hadn't met then and there, we would have just met somewhere else sometime.