#inevitability

The ultimate affront, that neither hurries, grows weary nor forgets, is called death. ↗

— Ahmadou Kourouma

#inevitability #death

The moving hand once having writ moves on. Nor all thy piety nor wit can lure it back to cancel half a line. ↗

— Omar Khayyám

#inevitability #life #time #life

So one must be resigned to being a clock that measures the passage of time, now out of order, now repaired, and whose mechanism generates despair and love as soon as its maker sets it going? Are we to grow used to the idea that every man relives ancient torments, which are all the more profound because they grow comic with repetition? That human existence should repeat itself, well and good, but that it should repeat itself like a hackneyed tune, or a record a drunkard keeps playing as he feeds coins into the jukebox... ↗

— Stanisław Lem

#cycles #despair #emotion #fear #free-will

I have produced no children of my own and my husband is dead," she replied, an acid tone in her voice. "Thus I am more to be pitied than revered. I am expected to give up the shop to my nephew, who will then be able to afford to bring a very good wife from Pakistan. In exchange, I will be given houseroom and no doubt, the honor of taking care of several small children of other family members." The Major was silent. He was at once appalled and also reluctant to hear any more. This was why people usually talked about the weather. ↗

— Helen Simonson

#family #family-relationships #inevitability #pessimism #relationships

Success sometimes may be defined as a disaster put on hold. Qualified. Has to be. ↗

— Nadine Gordimer

#inevitability #success #life

Liberalism regards life as an adventure in which we must take risks in new situation, in which there is no guarantee that the new will always be the good or the true, in which progress is a precarious achievement rather than inevitability. ↗

— Morris Raphael Cohen

#adventure #always #good #guarantee #inevitability

There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is the willingness to think. ↗

— Chuck Jones

#inevitability #long #think #willingness

No one should be surprised when Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda detonate a weapon of mass destruction in the United States. I don't believe in inevitability. But I think it's pretty close to being inevitable. ↗

— Michael Scheuer

#being #believe #bin #close #destruction

My intention here is to make it clear that not a single cell of my composition, here in regard to The Raven, is found by chance or intuition, that the composition moved towards perfection with the precision and inevitability of a mathematical equation. ↗

— Maurice Ravel

#chance #clear #composition #equation #found

I'm beginning to feel as though everything has happened before, that our story has already been told. Just as we were powerless to stop the fox stealing the chicken, so there seems to be an inevitability to all that takes place at Mosel. This is a ghost story. And we have somehow become the ghosts of these young men who worked this estate before the Great War. The living are the dead. ↗

— Helen Humphreys

#stories #men