Elizabeth Bowen Quotes

Fate will find a way.

Sometimes history takes things into its own hands.

This world is run with far too tight a rein for luck to interfere. Fortune sells her wares; she never gives them. In some form or other, we pay for her favors; or we go empty away.

Nothing ever happens till it happens.

What's meant to be will always find a way.

There is no armor against fate.

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.

Fate keeps on happening.

Most gods throw dice, but Fate plays chess, and you don't find out til too late that he's been playing with two queens all along.

There's very few people - like Shakespeare - who, no matter what, were gonna do what they did. For the rest of us, there's a lot of events that have to happen in order for things to end up the way they are.

Destiny waits alike for the free man as well as for him enslaved by another's might.

Man blindly works the will of fate.

There's this classic car crash thing about 'Macbeth.' You can just see this car driving at 100 mph towards this brick wall, and you can't do anything about it, and the characters are desperately trying to stop it and can't.

Fate steals along with silent tread, Found oftenest in what least we dread; Frowns in the storm with angry brow, But in the sunshine strikes the blow.

The world is so unpredictable. Things happen suddenly, unexpectedly. We want to feel we are in control of our own existence. In some ways we are, in some ways we're not. We are ruled by the forces of chance and coincidence.

It's a lot like life. I think 99 percent of what goes on in life, we have very little control over.

Man never legislates, but destinies and accidents, happening in all sorts of ways, legislate in all sorts of ways.

Life doesn't run away from nobody. Life runs at people.

Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the fates.

There is no such thing as accident; it is fate misnamed.

Everything happens kind of the way it's supposed to happen, and we just watch it unfold. And you can't control it. Looking back, you can't say, 'I should've... ' You didn't, and had you, the outcome would have been different.

Not without a shudder may the human hand reach into the mysterious urn of destiny.

It is the destiny of mint to be crushed.

Marriage happens; it can't be planned. When it has to happen, it will happen. Normally, what we always believe is that however prepared you are, if it's not meant to happen, it won't. And however much we have not planned, it will still happen if it's destined.

The compulsion of fate is bitter.