Fateful Decision Quotes

One small decision, for me to get on a flight from Finland to the U.K. - I had no idea how that one small thing could just change my whole life forever.

I must be gone and live, or stay and die.

There are so many things where I realize, like, simple circumstance, like the simple choice that I made one night to not do that and to do this, one night could have changed everything.

The die has been cast.

Decision equals destiny.

When I started acting I knew nothing. It was a momentous decision to pick up the flyer for the 'Trainspotting' audition. 'Destined' is a bit of a poncy word for it, but I do think I was headed in that direction.

Every life has a watershed moment, an instant when you realize you're about to make a choice that will define everything else you ever do, and that if you choose wrong, there may not be that many things left to choose. Sometimes the wrong choice is the only one that lets you face the end with dignity, grace, and the awareness that you're doing the right thing. I'm not sure we can recognize those moments until they've passed us.

I was once invited to take part in a heroic, possibly fatal enterprise, but I declined, mainly on account of sloth.

Delving into the past had unveiled a cruel lesson - that in the book of life it is perhaps best not to turn back pages; it was a path on which, whatever direction we took, we'd never be able to choose our own destiny.

So this is it. Match point for eternity.

One October day in 1976, a Cuban airliner exploded over the Caribbean and crashed, killing all 73 people aboard. There should have been 74. I had a ticket on that flight, but changed my reservation at the last moment and flew to Havana on an earlier plane.

Liadan," he said, staring intently at the ground. "Yes," I whispered. "Don't wed that man Eamonn. Tell him, if he takes you, he's a dead." --Bran

But yet I'll make assurance double sure, and take a bond of fate: thou shalt not live.

In the instant before the door opened, I could almost sense my life expanding just like a river whose waters have begun to swell; for I had never before taken such a drastic step to change the course of my own future. I was like a child tiptoeing along a precipice overlooking the sea. And yet somehow I hadn't imagined a great wave might come and strike me there, and wash everything away.

Sail on ship of state, sail on, I union, strong and great! Humanity with all its fears, with all its hopes of future years, is hanging on thy fate!

There is a point of no return, unremarked at the time, in most lives.

He had found the band of jackals he needed. But as Jack McCall rode through the center of town, he experienced the terrifying certainty that a man faces when he's about to make his own name famous. He lacked both a hero's calm and a coward's resolve to survive at any price.

The magic moment is the moment when a 'yes' or a 'no' can change our whole existence.

It's more like you meet someone, and you fall in love, and you hope that that person is the one - and then at some point, you have to put down your chips. You just have to make a commitment and hope that you're right.

"a fatal and perhaps fateful error of judgment" "...this was the last chance for the United Nations to get a grip on themselves and apply the principles of their Charter"

I got to thinking one day about all those women on the Titanic who passed up dessert at dinner that fateful night.