Quotes about Fate

But it was not to be.

Kraft was a skinny, harmless kid from Pennsylvania who wanted only to be liked, and was destined to be disappointed in even so humble and degrading an ambition. Instead, of being liked, he was dead, a bleeding cinder on the barbarous pile whom nobody had heard in those last precious moments while the plane with one wing plummeted.

You're inches away from death every time you go on a mission. How much older can you be at your age?

Death was irreversible, he suspected

That men would die was a matter of necessity; which men would die, though, was a matter of circumstance, and Yossarian was willing to be the victim of anything but circumstance.

Mudd was the unknown soldier who had never had a chance, for that was the only thing anyone ever did know about all the unknown soldiers—they never had a chance. They had to be dead.

and a great, choking moan tore from Yossarian's throat as McWatt turned again, dipped his wings once in salute, decided oh, well, what the hell, and flew into a mountain. Colonel

Why can't you be a fatalist about it the way I am? If I'm destined to unload these lighters at a profit and pick up some Egyptian cotton cheap from Milo, then that's what I'm going to do. And if you're destined to be killed over Bologna, then you're going to be killed, so you might just as well go out and die like a man. I hate to say this, Yossarian, but you're turning into a chronic complainer

Do not be afraid; our fate Cannot be taken from us; it is a gift.

Evil wishes, like chickens, come home to roost.

Forbear harping on what was of yore, for it is the common lot of mortals to sustain the ups and downs of fortune.

I feel as if I were a piece in a game of chess, when my opponent says of it: That piece cannot be moved.