“It s not my fate to give up--I know it can t be.”
“You won t understand this now, Saira. Later, perhaps. When you are older. When you learn that life is not only about the choices you make. That some of them will be made for you.”
“Every man carries the seed of his own death, and you will not be more than a man. You will have everything; you cannot have more…”
“Maybe it was fate that I sat next to her that day, or serendipity, divine intervention, who knows? However you look at, I got seated next to the first girl to ever really steal my heart. I was in love from that moment on.”
“And wonder, dread and war have lingered in that land where loss and love in turn have held the upper hand.”
“Fate s arrow, when expected, travels slow.”
“A certain something, he felt, had managed to work its way in through a tiny opening and was trying to fill a blank space inside him. The void was not one that she had made. It had always been there inside him. She had merely managed to shine a special light on it.”
“Who can ever know what path to walk on when all of them are either crooked or broken? One just has to walk.”
“That is a dream also; only he has remained asleep, while you have awakened; and who knows which of you is the most fortunate?”
“As if you could pick in love, as if it were not a lightning bolt that splits your bones and leaves you staked out in the middle of the courtyard.”
“There are things which cannot be carried through even with the good will of everybody concerned”
“That is life, isn’t it? Fate. Luck. Chance. A long series of what-if’s that lead from one moment to the next, time never pausing for you to catch your breath, to make sense of the cards that have been handed to you. And all you can do is play your cards and hope for the best, because in the end, it all comes back to those three basics. Fate. Luck. Chance.”
“Hide from fate all you like,” Baba Yellowlegs said as they turned away. “But it shall soon find you!”
“Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn t something that has nothing to do with you, This storm is you. Something inside you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn t get in, and walk through it, step by step. There s no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up the sky like pulverized bones.”
“We might not know we are seeking people who best enrich our lives, but somehow on a deep subconscious level we absolutely are. Whether the bond is temporary or permanent, whether it succeeds or fails, fate is simply a configuration of choices that combine with others to shape the relationships that surround us. We cannot choose our family, but we can choose our friends, and we sometimes, before we even meet them.”
“Coincidence is God s way of being anonymous.”
“Grappling with fate is like meeting an expert wrestler: to escape, you have to accept the fall when you are thrown. The only thing that counts is whether you get back up.”