Zadie Smith Quotes

Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect, as well as for the star. Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper.

You can't fight your fate...It is predestined.

The element running through entire nature, which we popularly call Fate, is known to us as limitation. Whatever limits us, we callFate.

Men speak of blind destiny, a thing without scheme or purpose. But what sort of destiny is that? Each act in this world from which there can be no turning back has before it another, and it another yet. In a vast endless net. Men imagine that the choices before them are theirs to make. But we are free to act only upon what is given. Choice is lost in the maze of generations and each act in the maze is itself an enslavement for it voids every alternative and binds one ever more tightly into the constraints that make a life.

Sometimes, what you do you have no control over because it's predestined. It's gonna happen in spite of you. There's nothing you can do about it.

Circumstances rule men; men do not rule circumstances.

I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.

Even the Gods Can't Change History

Things happen in the way they usually should. I'm a pretty fatalistic person.

This whole act's immutably decreed. 'Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before this ocean rolled. Fool! I am the Fates' lieutenant; I act under orders.

Everything that has happened had to happen. Everything that must happen cannot be stopped.

I knew it like destiny, and at the same time, I knew it as choice.

Everything that happens, happens of necessity.

The answer, The answer, my friend, is not yours to invent or create. It will be decided for you. It is outside you. It is real and objective and firm. One day you will hear it. You don’t create it. You don’t define it. It comes to you, and sooner or later you conform to it—or bow to it.

Now I see it clearly. My whole life has pointed in one direction. I see that now. There never has been any choice for me.

We are all fools blessed with the knowledge that certain events will come to pass no matter what path we take to get there. The wise ones follow their angels while they may.

The popular culture says . . . Do what you do, your life is predestined, like the installment plan on your house. There's not much you can do about it. Make your payments, live it, get sick, die, don't make any trouble. It is the Master Charge of destiny. Try to get your high credit rating.

Perhaps Fate laid out your life for you like a dress on a bed, and you could either wear it or go naked.

What happened was no accident. Everything was preordained. True, the will was free, but heaven also made its ordinances.

If you know that things are bound to happen whatever you do, then you may feel free to give up the fight against them.

Some things can't be changed. They'll always happen the way they were supposed to.

PREDESTINATION, n. The doctrine that all things occur according to programme. . . . not be confused with that of foreordination. The difference is great enough to have deluged Christendom with ink, to say nothing of the gore.

We are in the grip of some big machine grinding us along. The force of it simplifies everything. A weird calm settled over me from inside out. What is about to happen has stood in line to happen. All the roads out of that instant have been closed, one by one.

No one knew where you were before you were born, but when you were born, it wasn't long before you found you'd arrived with your return ticket already punched.