fate

Anyone who thought death warmed over didn't look good, had never seen this guy.

Maybe not getting what she wanted gave her everything she wanted after all.

Bad news. If you can see it coming, you brace yourself; you weigh the outcome. But there's always that niggling voice, that voice of hope whispering, 'Maybe it's good news.' Whether you can admit it or not, that little whisper is a potent thing.

You can change the road you take, but sometimes it can bend back to lead you straight to that same stubborn fate.

May your life be illuminated by a spark of divinity.

One by one, they guessed aloud about what Lotto had meant by this sculpture: nautilus, fiddlehead, galaxy. Thread running off its spindle. Forces of nature, perfect in beauty, perfectly ephemeral, they guessed. He was too shy to say time. He__ woken with a dry tongue and the urge to make the abstract concrete, to build his new understanding: that this was the way that time was, a spiral.He loved the uselessness of all the effort, the ephemerality of the work. The ocean encroached, it licked their feet. It pushed around the outside wall of the spiral, fingering its way in. When the water had scooped the sand from the lifeguard's chair, revealing white like bone beneath, something broke, and the fragments spun into the future. This day would bend back and shine itself into everything.

These things hath Fate brought to pass, and we be but Fate's whipping-tops bandied what way she will.

But why, everybody asks, am I not blessed by fortune (or at least not as blessed as I would like to be)? Why have I not been favored like others who are less deserving? No one believes their misfortunes are attributable to any shortcomings of their own; that is why they must find a culprit.

Life, death, preservation, loss, failure, success, poverty, riches, worthiness, unworthiness, slander, fame, hunger, thirst, cold, heat - these are the alternations of the world, the workings of fate. Day and night they change place before us, and wisdom cannot spy out their source. Therefore, they should not be enough to destroy your harmony; they should not be allowed to enter the storehouse of the spirit. If you can harmonize and delight in them, master them and never be at a loss for joy; if you can do this day and night without break and make it be spring with everything, mingling with all and creating the moment within your own mind - this is what I call being whole in power.

It seemed incredible that this day, a day without warnings or omens, might be that of my implacable death.

If luck wouldn't find him, he would do his best to make his own.

Life's full of events - they occur and you adjust, you roll and move on. But at some point you realize some events are actually developments. You realize there's a big plan out there you know nothing about, and a development is a first step in that new direction. Sometimes things feel like big-time developmens but in time you adjust, you find a new way and realize they didn't throw you off course, they didn't change you. They were just events. The tricky part is telling the difference between the two.

You__l have me,_ Cam whispered. __ou__l have me, hummingbird. I__ your fate_ even if you won__ admit it yet.

It is important not to become a prisoner of fate.

Our only fate is to lie in the beds that we make.

Maybe tell me about those letters. Confession is good for the soul."I expected her to tear into me yet again, but instead she stayed silent for several seconds, running her fingers over the trim of her blanket. "I do belive my soul is past the point of helping.""That's not true. It's never too late."She looked at the town as we walked by, her eyes heavy with fatigue. And an ache so deep, it didn't have a name. I'd seen that look in my own mirror."I gave up that right many years ago," she said. "My fate is like those envelopes-sealed and tossed aside.

You are divine being.

There is so much about my fate that I cannot control, but other things do fall under my jurisdiction. There are certain lottery tickets I can buy, thereby increasing my odds of finding contentment. 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 eat and read 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 (and on the occasions when I can't rise to the most optimistic viewpoint, because I'm feeling too damn sorry for myself, I can choose to keep trying to change my outlook). 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.