Quotes about fate

Bad things happen periodically, and they’re going to happen to somebody. Why not you?

Although there are those among us now who have been granted the gift of being able to glimpse patterns of the future, probabilities tossed like dice on the uneven blanket of space and time, even these gifted ones know that no single future has been preordained for us or our posterity. Events are fluid. The future is like smoke from a burning forest, waiting for the wind of specific events and personal courage to blow the sparks and embers of reality this way or that.

Chance is a funny thing and it is easily mistaken for portent.

A mere smile can determine a woman's fate. It is frightening. Fascinatingly so. I have to be careful.

Ned found that if he thought about things like that too much, the accident of it all, his mind started down unsettling paths.…

Could you make a pattern out of any of this? Stitch together the seeming randomness into something that had meaning? Is that what life was about, he wondered: trying to make that pattern, to have things make sense?

There are no wrong turnings. Only paths we had not known we were meant to walk.

A reminder of what it was to be mortal and so doomed to tread one road only and that one only once...We can never truly know the path we have not walked.

Once in a while you’re momentarily conscious of being happy. But I’m superstitious, and I picture Fate—best be respectful, and use a capital F—as a misty presence somewhere up in the sky but not too far away. Always listening, alert and ready to punish forbidden optimism.

It is never quite safe to think we have done with life. When we imagine we have finished our story fate has a trick of turning the page and showing us yet another chapter.

Accept whatever comes to you woven in the pattern of your destiny, for what could more aptly fit your needs?" This was written 2,ooo years ago by Marcus Aurelius, one of those exceedingly rare humans who possessed worldly power as well as wisdom.

It’s shocking to wake up in one world and find yourself in another by nightfall, but the situation isn’t actually all that unusual. You wake up married, then your spouse dies over the course of the day; you wake up in peacetime and by noon your country is at war; you wake up in ignorance and by the evening it’s clear that a pandemic is already here.

That was the universe: you could beat it once, you could float a message in a bottle across half of eternity, but the universe would always find a way to have the last laugh.