fate

My brother was on his wayto a dental appointmentwhen the second plane hitfour stories below the officewhere he worked. He__ neversaid anything about the guywho took football bets, howhe liked to watch his secretarywalk, the friends he ate lunch with,all the funerals. Maybe, shamedby his luck, he keeps quiet,afraid someone might guesshow good he feels, breathing.

It was just the way he was made.

The river of life, of mysterious laws and mysterious choice, flows past a deserted embankment; and along that other deserted embankment Charles now begins to pace, a man behind the invisible gun carriage on which rests his own corpse. He walks towards an imminent, self-given death? I think not; for he has at which to build; has already begun, though he would still bitterly deny it, thought there are tears in his eyes to support his denial, to realize that life, however advantageously Sarah may in some ways seem to fit the role of Sphinx, is not a symbol, is not one riddle and one failure to guess it, is not to inhabit one face alone or to be given up after one losing throw of the dice; but is to be, however inadequately, emptily, hopelessly into the city's iron heart, endured. And out again, upon the unplumb'd, salt, estranging sea.

Born distinct from each other, the invisible magical thread destined by fate. The thread may stretch or tangle but never break, as your presence will make the bond stronger between US.

Even if the decisions one made on a given day seemed crazy, it helped to think that all things happened for a mysterious reason.

I seem to see ahead, in a kind of way. I know we are going to take a very long road, into darkness; but I know I can't turn back.

Now she knew where to find me, if it was written that we would meet again, we would. The important thing is to allow fate to intervene in our lives and to decide what is best for everyone.

It__ an evil fate to fall into the hands of a persecutor who was once persecuted.

_and available man candy. But at least there would be mud, and maybe cows._ p12

Sometimes a cigar is just a smoke and a coincidence is just a coincidence.

Such ordeals always strike one with their strangeness, their digression from the normal flow of events, and often provoke a universal protest: "Why me?" Be sure that this is not a question but an outcry. The person who screams it has been instilled with an astonishing suspicion that he, in fact, has been the perfect subject for a very specific "weird," a tailor-made fate, and that a prior engagement, in all its weirdness, was fulfilled at the appointed time and place.

Fate is a cruelly sweet fruit.

What do you call it when you end up right where you__e supposed to be?_ Foster simply replies, __he perfect chemistry.

But I must warn you, Miss Hathaway ... life has a way of fouling up our plans. I speak from experience.

Since then many years have passed, and in those years I have often thought how strange are the ways of Fate. Set on one's waylay a single ill-considered spontaneous remark, one is led into a course of action that cannot be stopped whether one wants to or not. At the moment of departure we do not even dream of where our voyage will take us. Even when we have started we deluded ourselves for an unconscionable time that in a short while it will soon be over, and we shall be free again to do as we please. Sometimes, in forests, one meets two such paths that, although divided perhaps by a stream or ditch, seem at first sight to run parallel to one another. One imagines that whichever one chooses will lead us to the same place. However, slowly the paths diverge...and never meet again.

At the end of the day,_ he continued, __lthough many believe in fate, it__ those who go through life with independent thought alone who are the strongest.

Fate is for the weak--those people who don't have enough power or will to shape life into what they need it to be.

He is trapped underground, suddenly and unexpectedly close to death, but still in control of his fate. "At that moment I put death in my head and decided I would live with it," he says later.