“Everyone’s life is controlled by destiny, which is the consequence of karma in one’s past lives and present life.”

Paul Adirex, Mekong

“Duty is the essence of life, Nicholas. It is the only thing over which death has no dominion. It is true immortality.”

Eric Van Lustbader, The Ninja

“When one door closes, another opens… into another room, another space, other happenings. There are many doors to open and close in our lives. Some doors we leave ajar, when we hope and plan to return. Some doors are slammed shut decisively – “No more of that!” Some are closed regretfully, softly – “It was good, but it is over.” Departures entail arrivals somewhere else. Closing a door, leaving it behind, means opening onto new vistas and ventures, new possibilities, new incentives.”

Helen Nearing, When One Door Opens

“They tell you to do your thing but they don’t mean it. They don’t want you to do your thing, not unless it happens to be their thing, too. It’s a laugh, Goober, a fake. Don’t disturb the universe, Goober, no matter what the posters say.”

Robert Cormier, The Chocolate War

“I thought there was only us. I thought there was only now.”

Lois Lowry, The Giver

“Didn’t life consist of the things you did each day?”

Lois Lowry, The Giver

“There are all kinds of nuts running around loose.”

Robert Cormier, The Chocolate War

“Everybody has to do things in this world they don’t want to.”

Robert Cormier, The Chocolate War

“And he did see – that life was rotten, that there were no heroes, really, and that you couldn’t trust anybody, not even yourself.”

Robert Cormier, The Chocolate War

“The world was made up of two kinds of people – those who were victims and those who victimized.”

Robert Cormier, The Chocolate War

“Was this all there was to life, after all? You finished school, found an occupation, got married, became a father, watched your wife die, and then lived through days and nights that seemed to have no sunrise, no dawns and no dusks, nothing but a gray drabness.”

Robert Cormier, The Chocolate War

“Was life that dull, that boring and humdrum for people? He hated to think of his own life stretching ahead of him that way, a long succession of days and nights that were fine, fine – not good, not bad, not great, not lousy, not exciting, not anything.”

Robert Cormier, The Chocolate War

“Life is shit.”

Robert Cormier, The Chocolate War

“Life is sad, sometimes.”

Robert Cormier, The Chocolate War

“Acceptance of karma should not be confused with fatalism. We are all, to a great extent, masters of our own fate. But also we must learn to bow before the inevitable: this is the true meaning of acceptance and it is only this which brings the harmony without which life is not really worth living.”

Eric Van Lustbader, The Ninja

“None of us is destined to live forever.”

Lucia St. Clair Robson, Tokaido

“And human life, isn’t it similar to a puppet, haphazardly manipulated by Nature to the tune of Destiny?”

Bhanubhand Yugala, Rain in the Fifth Lunar Month

“Everything that happens in life is reward or punishment for what we have done. Only the ignorant resent their fate.”

Lucia St. Clair Robson, Tokaido

“What we do in life echoes in eternity.”

The Gladiator

“The reality of living was never greater than when you held death clutched tightly in your hands.”

Harold Robbins, Stiletto