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"Well -- think about this. What if all your actions and choices, good or bad, make no difference to God? What if the pattern is pre-set? No no -- hang on -- this is a question worth struggling with. What if our badness and mistakes are the very thing that set our fate and bring us round to good? What if, for some of us, we can't get there any other way?"
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"Plot twist: everything goes exactly as planned."
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Personal Development

"It seems when Opportunity knocks, Fate shows up to open the door."
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Personal Development

"Tis no wonder, says one of the ancients, that chance has so great a dominion over us, since it is by chance we live."
Author Name
Personal Development

"If the whole world is evil, then the tragedy that befell you is justified," she went on. "That would make it easier for you to accept the deaths of your wife and daughters. But if good people do exist, then, however much you deny it, your life will be unbearable; because fate set a trap for you, and you know you didn't deserve it. It isn't the light you want to recover, it's the certainty that there is only darkness."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Antonio: Will you stay no longer? nor will you not that I go with you? Sebastian: By your patience, no. My stars shine darkly over me; the malignancy of my fate might, perhaps, distemper yours; therefore I shall crave of you your leave that I may bear my evils alone. It were a bad recompense for your love to lay any of them on you."
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Personal Development

"It were for me To throw my sceptre at the injurious gods, To tell them that this world did equal theirs Till they had stolen our jewel."
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Personal Development

"We are the products of fate, from beginning to end."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Fate seems to be taking me in some even stranger directions."
Author Name
Personal Development

"There's that day when you realize that everything that happened before that one person found you, probably happened to prepare you and to prepare everything, for that person's arrival. It's not that everything suddenly "makes sense" but it's more that you understand why this didn't work and that didn't work and you fell into this ditch and you broke a certain bone somewhere. It's so they'd find you. Or so that you'd find them. So you'd find each other."
Author Name
Personal Development

"The ancients believed in Fate because they recognized how hard it is for anyone to change anything. The pull of past and future is so strong that the present is crushed by it. We lie helpless in the force of patterns inherited and patterns re-enacted by our own behavior. The burden is intolerable."
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Personal Development
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"Character, to me, is the life's blood of fiction."
Life


"But it's for every writer to decide his own pace, and the pace varies with the writer and the work."
Work


"I'm not sure whay I've been drawn to this subject, except that murder is a subject that has always drawn people for as long as people have been telling stories."
People


"I believe, in a funny way, the job of the novelist is to be out there on the fringes and speaking for an experience that has not really been spoken for."
Experience


"It's a long story. I'll make it short as I can."
Brevity


"Who knew, or cared, the names of the Turks who blew the roof off the Parthenon? the mullahs who had ordered the destruction of the Buddhas at Bamiyan? Yet living or dead: their acts stood. It was the worst kind of immortality. Intentionally or no: I had extinguished a light at the heart of the world."
Destruction


"So I'm not a Southern writer in the commonly held sense of the term, like Faulkner or Eudora Welty, who took the South for their entire literary environment and subject matter."
Environment


"It seems to me that psychology is only another word for what the ancients called fate."
Fate


"Grown children (an oxymoron, I realize) veer instinctively to extremes: the young scholar is much more a pedant than his older counterpart. And I, being young myself, took these pronouncements of Henry's very seriously. I doubt if Milton himself could have impressed me more."
Youth


"Real age, as I came to see from the genuine pieces that passed through my hands, was variable, crooked, capricious, singing here and sullen there, warm asymmetrical streaks on a rosewood cabinet from where a slant of sun had struck it while the other side was as dark as the day it was cut."
Time
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