You can’t keep yourself from falling in love, but you can steer yourself away from the wrong people.
—Jodi Picoult in Songs of the Humpback Whale
Destiny has two ways of crushing us—by refusing our wishes and by fulfilling them.
—Henri Frederic Amiel
Just because things hadn’t gone the way I had planned didn’t necessarily mean they had gone wrong.
—Ann Patchett in What Now?
Life can be unfair and unkind, but sometimes we just have to let go and let fate take over.
—Lisa De Jong in Plastic Hearts
Fate has a way of getting what she wants, no matter how we try to avoid it.
—Kresley Cole in Pleasure of a Dark Prince
Sometimes I remind myself that I almost skipped the party, that I almost went to a different college, that the whim of a minute could have changed everything and everyone. Our lives, so settled, so specific, are built on happenstance.
—Anna Quindlen in Every Last One
We are not makers of history. We are made by history.
—Martin Luther King Jr.
We are not permitted to choose the frame of our destiny. But what we put into it is ours.
—Dag Hammarskjöld
There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.
—Albert Camus
Experience has taught me that fate is sometimes cruel and that even a boatload of hope is sometimes not enough.
—Nicholas Sparks in The Longest Ride
I thought it must be fate that I kept bumping into him, some strange sign that he was meant to come back into my life and fix or change something, a voice from the past arriving in the present with the answers to everything.
—Sarah Dessen in That Summer
Man does not control his own fate. The women in his life do that for him.
—Groucho Marx
I think some people are just inexplicably bonded. Drawn by forces beyond their own comprehension, they have no choice but to gravitate toward one another. Destined by fate to keep crossing paths until they finally get it right.
—L.B. Simmons in The Resurrection of Aubrey Miller
Death is better, a milder fate than tyranny.
—Aeschylus
If you can't change your fate, change your attitude.
—Amy Tan