"Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans."
— John Lennon

"Fate is like a strange, unpopular restaurant filled with odd little waiters who bring you things you never asked for and don't always like."
— Lemony Snicket

"Edward. Edward. My life and his were twisted into a single strand. Cut one, and you cut both. If he were gone, I would not be able to live through that. If I were gone, he wouldn't live through it, either. And a world without Edward seemed completely pointless. Edward had to exist."
— Stephenie Meyer (Breaking Dawn)

"What's meant to be will always find a way"
— Trisha Yearwood

"Witch king: Fool. No man may can kill me!
Eowyn: (pulls off helmet) I am no man! (kills him)"
— J.R.R. Tolkien (The Lord of the Rings - Return of the King)

"There's nowhere you can be that isn't where you're meant to be..."
— John Lennon

"The only thing you have to decide is what to do with time that is given to you."
— J.R.R. Tolkien (The Lord of the Rings - Return of the King)

"Gandalf: The journey doesn’t end here. Death is just another path. One that we all must take. Grey rain curtan of this world rolls back and it all turns to silver glass. And then you see it."
"Pippen: What Gandalf? What?"
"Gandalf: White shores. And beyond, the far green country and a swift sunrise."
"Pippen: That isn't so bad."
"Gandalf: No. No, it isn't."

(From The Lord of the Rings screenplay by Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens; incorrectly attributed to JRR Tolkien)"
— Philippa Boyens

"Knowing too much of your future is never a good thing."
— Rick Riordan (The Lightning Thief)

"Reader, you must know that an interesting fate (sometimes involving rats, sometimes not) awaits almost everyone, mouse or man, who does not conform."
— Kate DiCamillo (Despereaux/the Tale Of Despereaux)

"We are all of us born with a letter inside us, and that only if we are true to ourselves, may we be allowed to read it before we die."
— Douglas Coupland

"I'm not absolutely certain of the facts, but I rather fancy it's Shakespeare who says that it's always just when a fellow is feeling particularly braced with things in general that Fate sneaks up behind him with the bit of lead piping."
— P.G. Wodehouse

"Fate loves the fearless."
— James Russell Lowell

"Take it from me, Fate doesn't care most of the time."
— Diana Wynne Jones (Castle in the Air)

"Sometimes the slightest things change the directions of our lives, the merest breath of a circumstance, a random moment that connects like a meteorite striking the earth. Lives have swiveled and changed direction on the strength of a chance remark."
— Bryce Courtenay

"There is so much about my fate that I cannot control, but other things do fall under the jurisdiction. I can decide how I spend my time, whom I interact with, whom I share my body and life and money and energy with. I can select what I can read and eat and study. I can choose how I'm going to regard unfortunate circumstances in my life-whether I will see them as curses or opportunities. I can choose my words and the tone of voice in which I speak to others. And most of all, I can choose my thoughts."
— Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia)

"The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it"
— Omar Khayyám (Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam)

"Accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate brings you together,but do so with all your heart."
— Marcus Aurelius

"the buddhists say there are 149 ways to god. i'm not looking for god, only for myself, and that is far more complicated. "
— jeanette winterson (sexing the cherry)

"The first lesson a revolutionary must learn is that he is a doomed man."
— Huey P. Newton

"And you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm. No matter how metaphysical or symbolic it might be, make no mistake about it: it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. People will bleed there, and you will bleed too. Hot, red blood. You'll catch that blood in your hands, your own blood and the blood of others. And once the storm is over you won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won't be the same person who walked in. That's what this storm's all about."
— Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)

"I knew it like destiny, and at the same time, I knew it as choice."
— Jeanette Winterson (Lighthousekeeping)

"Do not be afraid; our fate
Cannot be taken from us; it is a gift."
— Dante Alighieri (Inferno)

"Many young men started down a false path to their true destiny. Time and fortune usually set them aright."
— Mario Puzo (The Godfather)

"I thought about one of my favorite Sufi poems, which says that God long ago drew a circle in the sand exactly around the spot where you are standing right now. I was never not coming here. This was never not going to happen."
— Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia)

"We all have such fateful objects--it may be a recurrent landscape in one case, a number in another--carefully chosen by the gods to attract events of special significance for us: here shall John always stumble, there shall Jane's heart always break."
— Vladimir Nabokov (The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated)

"Everything was against us."
— Second Officer Lightoller, Senior Surviving Officer of Titanic

"Suddenly Ka realized he was in love with İpek. And realizing that this love would determine the rest of his life, he was filled with dread."
— Orhan Pamuk (Snow)

"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: Poems)

"as jolaha ka maram na jana, jinh jag ani pasarinhh tana;
dharti akas dou gad khandaya, chand surya dou nari banaya;
sahastra tar le purani puri, ajahu bine kathin hai duri;
kahai kabir karm se jori, sut kusut bine bhal kori;


No one could understand the secret of this weaver who, coming into existence, spread the warp as the world; He fixed the earth and the sky as the pillars, and he used the sun and the moon as two shuttles; He took thousands of stars and perfected the cloth; but even today he weaves, and the end is difficult to fathom.

Kabir says that the weaver, getting good or bad yarn and connecting karmas with it, weaves beautifully. "
— Kabir (The Bijak of Kabir)

"When fate hands us a lemon, let's try to make lemonade."
— Andrew Carnegie

"But in high school the business of irrevocable choices began. Doors slipped shut with a faint locking click that was only heared clearly in the dreams of later years."
— Stephen King (Cujo)

"When an inner situation is not made conscious it appears outside as fate."
— Carl Gustav Jung

"Habent sua fata libelli et balli [Books and bullets have their own destinies]"
— Ernst Junger (Storm of Steel)

"Cruel blows of fate call for extreme kindness in the family circle."
— Dodie Smith (I Capture the Castle)

"When the time is ripe for certain things, these things appear in different places in the manner of violets coming to light in early spring."
— Farkas Bolyai

"I am quite a wise old bird, but I am no desert hermit who can only prophesy when his guts are knotted with hunger. I am deep in the old man’s puzzle, trying to link the wisdom of the body with the wisdom of the spirit until the two are one."
— Robertson Davies

"I willingly accept Cassandra's fate
To speak the truth, although believed too late."
— Anne Killigrew

"Nico was wrong. The Book of Fate isn't already written. It's written every day.

Some scars never heal.
Then again, some do."
— Brad Meltzer

"If the gods have determined about me and about the things which must happen to me, they have determined well, for it is not easy even to imagine a deity without forethought; and as to doing me harm, why should they have any desire towards that? For what advantage would result to them from this or to the whole, which is the special object of their providence? But if they have not determined about me individually, they have certainly determined about the whole at least, and the things which happen by way of sequence in this general arrangement I ought to accept with pleasure and to be content with them."
— Marcus Aurelius (Meditations)

"Charakter ist Schicksal. Historie ist Gott."
— J.M. Coetzee (In the Heart of the Country)

"One minute you've got a lucky star watching over you and the next instant it's done a bunk."
— Salman Rushdie

"Crooked is the back of fate."
— Rex Holman