Vladimir Nabokov Quotes

and what might seem to be a series of unfortunate events may in fact be the first steps of a journey.

I, too, was carrying around my own fate. All the things I couldn't know sat somewhere inside, embroidered into me-maybe not quite fixed to the point of inevitability but waiting, in any event, for a chance to unspool.

The dictates of the heart are the voice of fate.

Events of all sorts creep or fly exactly as God pleases.

After all, our lives are but a sequence of accidents - a clanking chain of chance events. A string of choices, casual or deliberate, which add up to that one big calamity we call life.

I wonder how many people don't get the one they want, but end up with the one they're supposed to be with.

You may win your heart's desire, but in the end you're cheated of it by death.

Luck's the word those with poor hearts use for ka.

For the less even as for the greater there is some deed that he may accomplish but once only; and in that deed his heart shall rest.

Open the history of the past at whatsoever page you will and there you shall find coincidence at work bringing about events that the merest chance might have averted. Indeed, coincidence may be defined as the tool used by Fate to shape the destinies of men and nations.

Your number was up the first time I met you.

No one is so accursed by fate, no one so utterly desolate, but some heart though unknown responds unto his own.

A man seeks his own destiny and no other, said the judge. Wil or nill. Any man who could discover his own fate and elect therefore some opposite course could only come at last to that selfsame reckoning at the same appointed time, for each man's destiny is as large as the world he inhabits and contains within it all opposites as well. The desert upon which so many have been broken is vast and calls for largeness of heart but it is also ultimately empty. It is hard, it is barren. Its very nature is stone.

Do we make ourselves into what we become or is it built into our genes, into the fate spun for us by whatever shapes events?

Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events.

Opportunities and choices. When a person makes a heart wish, that wish resonates through the currents and things will happen to give the person an opportunity to make the wish come true. Like a hand offered and accepted.

Ain't it funny how a moment could just change your life, and you don't want to face what's wrong or right. Ain't it strange how fate can play a part, in the story of your heart.

The hero sees that the event is ancillary: it must follow him.

Pictures pass me in long review,-- Marching columns of dead events. I was tender, and, often, true; Ever a prey to coincidence. Always knew I the consequence; Always saw what the end would be. We're as Nature has made us -- hence I loved them until they loved me.

Like a river flows surely to the sea/Darling so it goes/Some things are meant to be/Take my hand, take my whole life too/For I can't help falling in love with you.

The moment you fall in love feels like it has centuries behind it, generations - all of them rearranging themselves so this precise, remarkable intersection could happen. In your heart, in your bones, no matter how silly you know it is, you feel that everything has been leading to this, all the secret arrows were pointing here, the universe and time itself crafted this long ago, and you are just now realizing it, you are just now arriving at the place you were always meant to be.

man cannot control the current of events. he can only float with them and steer

Fate does not jest and events are not a matter of chance. There is no existence out of nothing.

I ignored the flashes of lightning all around me. They either had your number on them or they didn't.