Inevitability Quotes

“You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep Spring from coming.”
― Pablo Neruda

“After all, if you do not resist the apparently inevitable, you will never know how inevitable the inevitable was.”
― Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right

“And so castles made of sand slips into the sea, eventually.”
― Jimi Hendrix

“This last night we tear into each other, as if to wound, as if to find the key to everything before morning.”
― Michael Ondaatje, Coming Through Slaughter

“Whether the bear beats the wolf or the wolf beats the bear, the rabbit always loses.”
― Robert Jordan, The Eye of the World

“Just because an apple falls one hundred times out of a hundred does not mean it will fall on the hundred and first.”
― Derek Landy, Death Bringer

“If we could learn to look instead of gawking,
We'd see the horror in the heart of farce,
If only we could act instead of talking,
We wouldn't always end up on our arse.
This was the thing that nearly had us mastered;
Don't yet rejoice in his defeat, you men!
Although the world stood up and stopped the bastard,
The bitch that bore him is in heat again.”
― Bertolt Brecht, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui

“The inevitable is no less a shock just because it is inevitable.”
― Jamaica Kincaid, The Autobiography of My Mother

“Old age is like a plane flying through a storm. Once you're aboard there's nothing you can do.”
― Golda Meir, As good as Golda;: The warmth and wisdom of Israel's Prime Minister

“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, Solaris

“Death, of course, is not a failure. Death is normal. Death may be the enemy, but it is also the natural order of things.”
― Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

“Anything can happen: anything. Or nothing. Who can say? The world, monstrous, is made that way, and in the end consumes us all. Who am I, administrated or no, to have the audacity to survive it?”
― Brian Evenson, Fugue State

“Time after time have nations, ay, and rich and strong nations, learned in the arts, been, and passed away to be forgotten, so that no memory of them remains. This is but one of several; for Time eats up the works of man.”
― H. Rider Haggard, She: A History of Adventure

“The land of easy mathematics where he who works adds up and he who retires subtracts.”
― Núria Añó

“Success sometimes may be defined as a disaster put on hold. Qualified. Has to be.”
― Nadine Gordimer, Get a Life

“Jesus can always reject his father,
But he cannot escape his mother's blood.
He'll scream and try to wash it off of his fingers,
But he'll never escape what he's made up of.”
― Ethel Cain

“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, The Lost Garden

“Do one thing each day that makes you feel good. Keep moving, make mistakes, and challenge yourself. The lessons that lead to personal growth and clarity are inevitable.”
― Dee Waldeck

“I love Gina. But I carry you in my bloodstream. This isn't a choice."

"Of course it's a choice."

"No, it's what I have to do.”
― Miranda Cowley Heller, The Paper Palace

“Everything has
its own pace
its own timing.

True of working, studying, learning.
True of illness, sorrow, grief.
True of change, of transformation.
True of conflict.
True of peace.

You can't change the pace
without changing its nature,
changing the experience.
And the experience is its own end.

The end never justifies the means
because every means is its own end.

It's not just about you,
your natural pace,
it's about what you're doing
what's being done
butterfly effects
over miles and years.

The river will not be pushed.
The rain will not cease until it has finished pouring down.
The sun will not rise before dawn.

This is where we are.”
― Shellen Lubin

“[W]e made the mistake of assuming that there is something inevitable about democracy - you know, that it's a - you don't really have to do anything. If you just sit still, it will come because it's the natural way that human beings are. And, you know, we forgot about, first of all, how turbulent our own democracy has been over 200 years, and we also forgot about the deep appeal of autocracy and the power of extremism.

You know, there are people - there is a part of every society that's deeply bothered by rapid change - that dislikes - you know, whether it's the election of Obama or whether it's racial integration or whether it's rapid economic change - you know, that dislikes change, wants it to stop, dislikes political strife, wants it to end and prefers to be within a homogenous movement where everybody's united. It's funny - there's a kind of deep human desire for unity, and this is what autocrats see and intuitively understand and why some of them have been able to hold power.”
― Anne Applebaum

“...no one of intelligence resents the inevitable.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood’s End

“Crimes determined to take place engender all they need: victims, circumstances, pretexts, opportunities.”
― Paul Valéry, Selected Writings

“Sometimes you know something is going to happen, even though they are ample opportunities to prevent it. Even though you don't want it, you know it's inevitable.”
― Augusten Burroughs, Toil & Trouble

“From stone to sand and sand to silt, what grows today will one day wilt.”
― Sean Norris, Heaven and Hurricanes

“Love like that is a deep well, with very steep sides. Once you fall in, that's it - you will love that person always.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, City of Girls

“Nevertheless, life and death are mysterious states, and we know little of the resources of either.”
― Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

“There is no arguing with inevitability, but one does not have to pay it heed.”
― Jake Burnett

“The pain of today can never offset the inevitability of tomorrow.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“It would take many reflective hours and long walks and deep readings to come to terms with what had been given to me on that night. That there is no one moment. That my dream of the three white lice had foretold what would happen. Ford's death was already approaching as we lay in our beds the night before the accident, other worlds advancing towards ours, their coming together so deeply rooted in the past that there was no beginning. From before his conception Fordie had been moving towards his death--forgive him that moment of standing behind that truck; forgive that young fellow behind the wheel whose life had brought him to that moment of distraction; forgive the collision of their worlds in that moment that continues living through the lives of others. Forgive.

Forgive me my smallness of mind in believing I could have or might have or should have changed the course of a moment that had been careening towards us for thousands of years and forgive God for shaping us all within the confines of the one transcendent moment that stretches through to eternity.”
― Donna Morrissey, Pluck: A memoir of a Newfoundland childhood and the raucous, terrible, amazing journey to becoming a novelist