Cormac McCarthy Quotes

You can't control where your heart goes.

I thought that love was a river, endless and deep. I thought it merely happened, washing over you like water. It was nothing to search for, nothing to force. I didn't understand that even when we can't control our fate, we alone have the last say in matters of the heart. We can give it freely, even in the worst of times, even when it isn't returned.

Fate hath no voice but the heart's impulse.

The world is a drought when out of love.

The heart is its own Fate.

The web of this world is woven of Necessity and Chance. Woe to him who has accustomed himself from his youth up to find something necessary in what is capricious, and who would ascribe something like reason to Chance and make a religion of surrendering to it.

What can i tell you about the choices we make? Fate reads like the polar opposite of decision, and so much of life reads like fate.

Failure to plan brings barrenness and sterility. Fate brushes man with its wings, but we make our own fate largely.

The future was with Fate. The present was our own.

We cut these numerous windings in our destinies daily with our own hands, while we imagine that we are pursuing a track on the royal high road of respectability and duty, and then complain of those ways being so intricate and so dark. We stand bewildered before the mystery of our own making, and the riddles of life that we will not solve, and then accuse the great Sphinx of devouring us.

One of the aphorisms occurred to me now and I wrote it under the picture: "Fate and temperament are two words for one and the same concept." That was clear to me now.

Fate does not always seek our consent.

He realized now he was only just beginning to see the full extent to which it was his destiny to follow, to walk blindly into fates he could never understand. In fate there was reward, in turning over one's heart to God there was a magnificence that lay beyond description. At the moment one is sure that all is lost, look at what is gained!

"What we control," Juliette said, "is our actions once fate puts us there."

Freedom and destiny are solemnly promised to one another and linked together in meaning.

Nico was wrong. The Book of Fate isn't already written. It's written every day. Some scars never heal. Then again, some do.

You don’t choose a life, dad. You live one.

Only if you resist what happens are you at the mercy of what happens, and the world will determine your happiness and unhappiness

The life we receive is not always what we choose.

This is one of the two great labyrinths into which human minds are drawn: the question of free will versus predestination.

...remember one thing only: that it's you-nobody else-who determines your destiny and decides your fate. Nobody else can be alive for you; nor can you be alive for anybody else.

If a dream can tell the future it can also thwart that future. For God will not permit that we shall know what is to come. He is bound to no one that the world unfold just so upon its course and those who by some sorcery or by some dream might come to pierce the veil that lies so darkly over all that is before them may serve by just that vision to cause that God should wrench the world from its heading and set it upon another course altogether and then where stands the sorcerer? Where the dreamer and his dream?

Fate isn’t one straight road…there are forks in it, many different routes to different ends. We have the free will to choose the path.

Why was I chosen?' 'Such questions cannot be answered,' said Gandalf. 'You may be sure that it was not for any merit that others do not possess. But you have been chosen, and you must therefore use such strength and heart and wits as you have.

Our wills and fates do so contrary run.