#fatalism

First, all I could see was this beautiful face, this beautiful girl's face; like a white, slightly luminous mask, swimming detachedly against enfolding darkness. As if a little private spotlight of its own was trained on it from below. It was so beautiful and so false, and I seemed to know it so well, and my heart was wrung. There was no danger yet, just this separate, shell-like face mask standing out. But there was danger somewhere around, I knew that already; and I knew that I couldn't escape it. I knew that everything [ was about to do, I had to do, I couldn't avoid doing. And yet, oh, I didn't want to do it. I wanted to turn and flee, I wanted to get out of wherever this was. ("Nightmare") ↗

— Cornell Woolrich

#femme-fatale #nightmare #beauty

Your life must now run the course that's been set for it. ↗

— Kazuo Ishiguro

#life

All through the night, men looked at the sky and were saddened by the stars. ↗

— Joseph Heller

#humor #stars #war #humor

Fatalism is the lazy man's way of accepting the inevitable. ↗

— Natalie Clifford Barney

#fatalism #inevitable #lazy #man #way

You can’t change the past. You can’t even change the future, in the sense that you can only change the present one moment at a time, stubbornly, until the future unwinds itself into the stories of our lives. ↗

— Larry Wall

#change #determinism #fatalism #free-will #change