“Because I had sought to challenge Destiny, Destiny had taken vengeance.”
Michael Moorcock book Phoenix in Obsidian
Book 3 “Visions and Revelations” Chapter 5 “The Waking of the Sword” (p. 421)
Phoenix in Obsidian (1970)
On the deterioration of her marriage to Kenneth Tynan, as quoted in her obituary in The Telegraph (6 May 2008) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1933071/Elaine-Dundy.html?source=rss
“Because I had sought to challenge Destiny, Destiny had taken vengeance.”
Michael Moorcock book Phoenix in Obsidian
Book 3 “Visions and Revelations” Chapter 5 “The Waking of the Sword” (p. 421)
Phoenix in Obsidian (1970)
Colin Wilson book The Misfits: A Study of Sexual Outsiders
Source: The Misfits: A Study of Sexual Outsiders (1988), p. 86
Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle (1657–1757) French writer, satirist and philosopher of enlightenment
1792) as quoted by I. Bernard Cohen, Revolution in Science (1985
“I had a vision of the face of destiny.”
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900–1944) French writer and aviator
Source: Terre des Hommes (1939), Ch. I : The Craft
Context: I had a vision of the face of destiny.
Old bureaucrat, my comrade, it is not you who are to blame. No one ever helped you to escape. You, like a termite, built your peace by blocking up with cement every chink and cranny through which the light might pierce. You rolled yourself up into a ball in your genteel security, in routine, in the stifling conventions of provincial life, raising a modest rampart against the winds and the tides and the stars. You have chosen not to be perturbed by great problems, having trouble enough to forget your own fate as man. You are not the dweller upon an errant planet and do not ask yourself questions to which there are no answers. You are a petty bourgeois of Toulouse. Nobody grasped you by the shoulder while there was still time. Now the clay of which you were shaped has dried and hardened, and naught in you will ever awaken the sleeping musician, the poet, the astronomer that possibly inhabited you in the beginning.
The squall has ceased to be a cause of my complaint. The magic of the craft has opened for me a world in which I shall confront, within two hours, the black dragons and the crowned crests of a coma of blue lightnings, and when night has fallen I, delivered, shall read my course in the stars.
“It turned out I had always been a smoker. I just hadn't had any cigarettes.”
Augusten Burroughs book Running with Scissors
Source: Running with Scissors