The Inexorable Quotes

I was sitting in a movie theater at 4:13 in the morning, with a faerie muse who had vaguely psychic vampire tendencies, watching The Sixth Sense.
At this point in my life I'd had some pretty freaky, surreal experiences already, such as (1) watching my best friend move things with her mind, (2) being dragged from my wrecked car by a soulless faerie assassin, and (3) feeling the inexorable pull of the king of the dead's nightly song. And really, sitting with Nuala and watching a crazy little boy tell Bruce Willis that he saw dead people should've been included amongst them. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

Nothing on the horizon; nothing in heaven.

He implores the expanse, the waves, the seaweed, the reef; they are deaf. He beseeches the tempest; the imperturbable tempest obeys only the infinite.

Around him darkness, fog, solitude, the stormy and non- sentient tumult, the undefined curling of those wild waters. In him horror and fatigue. Beneath him the depths. Not a point of support. He thinks of the gloomy adventures of the corpse in the limitless shadow. The bottomless cold paralyzes him. His hands contract convulsively; they close, and grasp nothingness. Winds, clouds, whirlwinds, gusts, useless stars! What is to be done? The desperate man gives up; he is weary, he chooses the alternative of death; he resists not; he lets himself go; he abandons his grip; and then he tosses forevermore in the lugubrious dreary depths of engulfment.

Oh, implacable march of human societies! Oh, losses of men and of souls on the way! Ocean into which falls all that the law lets slip! Disastrous absence of help! Oh, moral death!

The sea is the inexorable social night into which the penal laws fling their condemned. The sea is the immensity of wretchedness.

The soul, going down stream in this gulf, may become a corpse. Who shall resuscitate it? ~ Victor Hugo

Eve continued with the inexorable process of dying, Zoe spent too much time with her grandparents, and Denny and I worked at slowing the beating of our hearts so we wouldn't feel so much pain. ~ Garth Stein

We also have to bear in mind that our own sense of what is plausible and implausible is severely limited by the fact that the modern world is dominated by an extremely narrow range of family arrangements. Looking in anthropology books on kinship and marriage is like opening a book on a huge variety of dead and dying languages, all victims of the inexorable homogenisation of the world that has been in progress since the dawn of civilisation. ~ Patricia Crone

One only makes books in order to keep in touch with one's fellows after one has ceased to breath, and thus to defend oneself against the inexorable fate of all that lives - transitoriness and oblivion. ~ Stefan Zweig

Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms, suggests guilt. ~ Susan Sontag

When I began my career as a cosmologist some twenty years ago, I was a convinced atheist. I never in my wildest dreams imagined that one day I would be writing a book purporting to show that the central claims of Judeo-Christian theology are in fact true, that these claims are straightforward deductions of the laws of physics as we now understand them. I have been forced into these conclusions by the inexorable logic of my own special branch of physics. ~ Frank J. Tipler

Art has no obligation to evolve but it has a powerful incentive to do so. Art that is static, that captures a dead moment, is nothing. It is, at best, nostalgia; at worst, it can be a blight on our sense of who we are, a shame we pack away. Artists who refuse to listen, participate, and change along with the world around them are not being silenced or punished by censorious college sophomores, they are letting obsolescence devour them voluntarily. Political correctness is just the inexorable turn of the gear. Falling behind is preventable. ~ Lindy West

Is Christian ethics merely a specific set of Christian answers to the question of good and evil, right and wrong? To make it no more than this is to forget that man's fall was a fall into the knowledge of good and evil, reinforced by the inexorable knowledge of a condemning law, and that man's restoration in Christ is a restoration to freedom and grace, to a love that needs no law since it knows and does only what is in accord with love and with God. To imprison ethics in the realm of division, of good and evil, right and wrong, is to condemn it to sterility, and rob it of its real reason for existing, which is love. Love cannot be reduced to one virtue among many others prescribed by ethical imperatives. When love is only "a virtue" among many, man forgets that "God is love" and becomes incapable of that all-embracing love by which we secretly begin to know God as our Creator and Redeemer - who has saved us from the limitations of a purely restrictive and aimless existence "under a law."

So Bonhoeffer says very rightly: "In the knowledge of good and evil man does not understand himself in the reality of the destiny appointed in his origin, but rather in his own possibilities, his possibility of being good or evil. He knows himself now as something apart from God, outside God, and this means that he now knows only himself and no longer knows God at all…. The knowledge of good and evil is therefore separation from God. Only against God can man know good and evil. ~ Thomas Merton

There was an art to living, and sometimes it required the inexorable, relentless resolve just to keep plowing forward, one step at a time, no matter what the hell it was you were doing. ~ Marjorie M. Liu

If China someday gains a more fair, just, and accountable system of government, it will be due to the hard work and efforts of the Chinese people, not due to the inexorable workings of any particular technology. ~ Rebecca MacKinnon

We must proceed with a full realization that no statute enacted by man can repeal the inexorable laws of nature. ~ Warren G. Harding

There is no escape from the vast imbalances in international trade and finance. They will be corrected, sooner or later, by the inexorable principles that govern human action. ~ Hans F. Sennholz

Professional learning does not advance ... through the inexorable confirmation of previous certainties, but through a systematic challenge to our present conceptions ~ Douglass B. Reeves

The inexorable search for a stanza of meaning hangs like a thundercloud over the troposphere of humankind's prosaic existence. A dithering sense of loss engulfs us. Humankind's unattainable desire to achieve a slice of perfection generates a suspenseful haze of doom. A lingering stab of incompleteness coupled with the tantalizing riddles of fate are inalterably interlinked and imbued in all thinking people's tormented soul. This cross coalescence of unattainable longing melds with the mystic tinged edges of uncertainty, spawned by the unanswerable questions posed by fate, fomenting a dialectical dissonance that distinguishes and ultimately exemplifies the arc of humankind's plaintive subsistence. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

However much we talk of the inexorable laws governing the life of individuals and of societies, we remain at the bottom convinced that in human affairs everything in more or less fortuitous. We do not even believe in the inevitability of our own death. Hence the difficulty of deciphering the present, of detecting the seeds of things to come as they germinate before our eyes. We are not attuned to seeing the inevitable. ~ Eric Hoffer

The inexorable boredom that is at the core of life. ~ Jacques-Benigne Bossuet

What did the Revolution mean to the Native Americans, the Indians? They had been ignored by the fine words of the Declaration, had not been considered equal, certainly not in choosing those who would govern the American territories in which they lived, nor in being able to pursue happiness as they had pursued it for centuries before the white Europeans arrived. Now, with the British out of the way, the Americans could begin the inexorable process of pushing the Indians off their lands, killing them if they resisted. In short, as Francis Jennings puts it, the white Americans were fighting against British imperial control in the East, and for their own imperialism in the West. ~ Howard Zinn

There is no such thing as time. There is only our reaction to the inexorable progress of life. ~ Mary Balogh

Staring into his dark eyes, she felt the doubts she had nurtured slipping away on a single breath. She reached out to him again, pulling him toward her. Their bodies met, two galaxies subject to the inexorable pull of the universe, both determined to remain connected, if only by a bridge of stars. ~ Kirsten Beyer

Each day a whole world passes away, largely unappreciated, numbly relegated to obligation, commerce and routine. One day seems as unremarkable as the next. It's only through the inexorable accretion of days, weeks, months and years, that we come to appreciate with heartbreaking clarity how incredibly unique and precious each lost day has been. ~ S.W. Clemens

CONGS CATASTROPHE
In their primal gladiatorial tourney N. Baddesley jousting on their own bailiwick encountered the full and furious blast of Steeple Sinderby's New Look Lads spearheaded by Sid Swift, long-lost Shooting Star idol of Brum fans a handful of time ago. The Ringers clocked up eleven strikes and only the inexorable march of time muffled a full peal of twelve. ~ J.L. Carr

Of the Yamacraw children, I can say little. I don't think I changed the quality of their lives significantly or altered the inexorable fact that they were imprisoned by the very circumstance of their birth. ~ Pat Conroy

Perhaps the most that can be said is that HCM had become a prisoner of his own creation, a fly in amber, unable in his state of declining influence to escape the inexorable logic of a system that sacrificed the fate of individuals to the "higher morality" of the master plan. ~ William J. Duiker

I do, however, struggle to reconcile what medicine has taught me so well with the very reasons that drew me to it in the first place. I want to cry for those in whose bellies I find disseminated tumors, but cannot for fear of being unable to see clearly enough to sew them closed. I want to sit and linger with my patients, but know that such inefficiency would never work in the clinical world. I want to be able to soothe my patients' suffering without the burden of knowing the inexorable future of their diseases. ~ Pauline W. Chen

A fascinating mystery of nature is manifested in the universal fact of hunting: the inexorable hierarchy among living beings. Every animal is in a relationship of superiority or inferiority with regard to every other. Strict equality is exceedingly improbable and anomalous. ~ Jose Ortega Y Gasset

We are grossly wasting our energy resources and other precious raw materials as though their supply were infinite. We must even face the prospect of changing our basic ways of living. This change will either be made on our own initiative in a planned and rational way, or forced on us with chaos and suffering by the inexorable laws of nature. ~ Jimmy Carter

Once you have met your own soul, you know that you are being guided. You are being led from within, and even the inexorable wheel of life is your teacher. It is the cycle of failure and renewal that slowly lowers you into the arms of a very safe God. ~ Richard Rohr

Sometimes in those moments of greatest abandonment when we feel utterly deserted a sign appears where we least expect it and shows us the way. Those who dare to advance into darkness, expecting nothing, will at last find their shining goal. On a page torn from a book, which an autumn wind blew around my feet, I read the words that showed me I was on the right path: "The initiate who sets out in good faith to find the Truth, only to find, on all sides, the inexorable barrier that throws him back into the 'ordinary tumult,' will hear the Master say: 'Watch out, there is a wall.' 'But is this wall temporary?' asks the restless soul, 'can I pass through it or demolish it? Is it an adversary? Is it a friend?' 'I cannot tell you. You must discover it for yourself. ~ Alejandro Jodorowsky

His own exclamation: "Women should be free - as free as we are," struck to the root of a problem that it was agreed in his world to regard as nonexistent. "Nice" women, however wronged, would never claim the kind of freedom he meant, and generous-minded men like himself were therefore - in the heat of argument - the more chivalrously ready to concede it to them. Such verbal generosities were in fact only a humbugging disguise of the inexorable conventions that tied things together and bound people down to the old pattern. ~ Edith Wharton

Some may remain imprisoned in a gridlock of lies or keep on blurring the lines between facts and fables, expecting us to buy the debilitating and fake narrative of their life, until they eventually end up on the chopping block of the inexorable truth. Be that as it may, one can "fool people some of the time, but not all of the time". ("Bribe payers' index ») ~ Erik Pevernagie

But the fact is, death is not a confrontation. It is simply an event in the sequence of nature's ongoing rhythms. Not death but disease is the real enemy, disease the malign force that requires confrontation. Death is the surcease that comes when the exhausting battle has been lost. Even the confrontation with disease should be approached with the realization that many of the sicknesses of our species are simply conveyances for the inexorable journey by which each of us is returned to the same state of physical, and perhaps spiritual, nonexistence from which we emerged at conception. Every triumph over some major pathology, no matter how ringing the victory, is only a reprieve from the inevitable end. ~ Sherwin B. Nuland

John Brown's zeal in the cause of freedom was infinitely superior to mine. Mine was as the taper light; his was as the burning sun. I could live for the slave; John Brown could die for him. The American people and the Government at Washington may refuse to recognize it for a time but the inexorable logic of events will force it upon them in the end; that the war now being waged in this land is a war for and against slavery. ~ Frederick Douglass

His life coiled back into the brown murk of the past like a twined filament of electric wire; he gave life, a pattern, and movement to these million sensations that Chance, the loss or gain of a moment, the turn of the head, the enormous and aimless impulsion of accident, had thrust into the blazing heat of him. His mind picked out in white living brightness these pinpoints of experience and the ghostliness of all things else became more awful because of them. So many of the sensations that returned to open haunting vistas of fantasy and imagining had been caught from a whirling landscape through the windows of the train.

And it was this that awed him - the weird combination of fixity and change, the terrible moment of immobility stamped with eternity in which, passing life at great speed, both the observer and the observed seem frozen in time. There was one moment of timeless suspension when the land did not move, the train did not move, the slattern in the doorway did not move, he did not move. It was as if God had lifted his baton sharply above the endless orchestration of the seas, and the eternal movement had stopped, suspended in the timeless architecture of the absolute. Or like those motion-pictures that describe the movements of a swimmer making a dive, or a horse taking a hedge - movement is petrified suddenly in mid-air, the inexorable completion of an act is arrested. Then, completing its parabola, the suspended body plops down into the pool. Only, ~ Thomas Wolfe

How the privilege of my education, my eventual ascent into another class, was born in the inexorable push of my mother's hands. How unfair it all seemed. ~ Jesmyn Ward

Instantly, the noise stopped. The whole room lay in perfect silence. The tire builders stood in long lines, touching each other, perfectly motionless, deafened by the silence ... For the first time in history, American mass-production workers had stopped a conveyor belt and halted the inexorable movement of factory machinery. ~ Ruth McKenney

The Spanish and Portuguese empires proclaimed that it was not riches they sought in the Indies and America, but converts to the true faith. The sun never set on the British mission to spread the twin gospels of liberalism and free trade. The Soviets felt duty-bound to facilitate the inexorable historical march from capitalism towards the utopian dictatorship of the proletariat. Many Americans nowadays maintain that their government has a moral imperative to bring Third World countries the benefits of democracy and human rights, even if these goods are delivered by cruise missiles and F-16s. ~ Yuval Noah Harari

This wasn't the sea of the inexorable horizon and smashing waves, not the sea of distance and violence, but the sea of the etenally leveling patience and wetness of water. Whether it comes to you in a storm or in a cup, it owns you
we are more water than dust. It is our origin and our destination. ~ Denis Johnson

Spring, the snow must go; fall, the leaves can't stay. ~ Marty Rubin

Work, work, proletarians, to increase social wealth and your individual poverty; work, work, in order that becoming poorer, you may have more reason to work and become miserable. Such is the inexorable law of capitalist production. ~ Paul Lafargue

Those thoroughly incorporated within the inexorable logic of the market and its demands find that there is little time and space in which to explore emancipatory potentialities outside what is marketed as 'creative' adventure, leisure, and spectacle. Obliged to live as appendages of the market and of capital accumulation rather than as expressive beings, the realm of freedom shrinks before the awful logic and the hollow intensity of market involvements ~ David Harvey

The villagers were speeding up the circling of events because she was too shortsighted to see that her infidelity had already harmed the village, the waves of consequences would return unpredictably, sometimes in disguise, as now, to hurt her. This roundness had to be made coin-sized so that she would see is circumference: punish her at the birth of her baby. Awaken her to the inexorable. People who refused fatalism because they could invent small resources insisted on culpability. Deny accidents and wrest fault from the stars. ~ Maxine Hong Kingston

The real romance in life didn't come in that first sweet taste of love, as profound and life changing as it was. There was love then, yes. Obsession, passion, infatuation. All of that and more.
But the true romance came from the slow lapse of time, the inexorable passing of days, weeks, months, years decades.
I'd hold onto her with the last breath in my body. My final thought would be that I hadn't gotten enough, I just knew it.
Because I would never have enough. ~ R.K. Lilley

Ashes

The tide comes in; the tide goes out again
washing the beach clear of what the storm
dumped. Where there were rocks, today there is sand;
where sand yesterday, now uncovered rocks.

So I think on where her mortal remains
might reach landfall in their transmuted forms,
a year now since I cast them from my hand
- wanting to stop the inexorable clock.

She who died by her own hand cannot know
the simple love I have for what she left
behind. I could not save her. I could not
even try. I watch the way the wind blows
life into slack sail: the stress of warp against weft
lifts the stalling craft, pushes it on out. ~ Paula Meehan

-You are killing me."
" -We? Not we. Not in any sense, we. Processes are killing you, not we. Inexorable processes. ~ Donald Barthelme

He is a strange, resolute, repulsive, iron-willed, inexorable old man, [possessing] a firey nature and a cold temper, and a cooler head--a volcano beneath a covering of snow. ~ William A. Phillips

Revenge is like sex, Mister Dresden. It's best when it comes on slow, quiet, until it all seems inexorable. ~ Jim Butcher

Death is inexorable but not treacherous. ~ Ann Aguirre

He who will not risk cannot win. ~ John Paul Jones

Whoever has witnessed another's ideal becomes his inexorable judge and as it were his evil conscience. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

What is life? Life - that is: continually shedding something that wants to die. Life - that is: being cruel and inexorable against everything about us that is growing old and weak -and not only about us. Life - that is, then: being without reverence for those who are dying, who are wretched, who are ancient? Constantly being a murderer? -And yet old Moses said: Thou shalt not kill. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

It was one long, anxious, inexorable, eternal vigil. ~ Frank James

It is useless, after all, to complain against inexorable reality. ~ Jack Vance

There is an inexorable correlation between leadership and change. ~ Andy Stanley

As more people are added to any group, there is an inexorable drift toward inflexibility. ~ Ed Catmull

Wyrd bið ful āraed. Fate is inexorable. We are given power and we lose it. ~ Bernard Cornwell

Change is as inexorable as time, yet nothing meets with more resistance. ~ Benjamin Disraeli

A new respect for Nature had been learned, a new kinship with sun and water and soil ... They had learned that while Nature is often beautiful and kind, her laws must be respected, for they are ruthless and inexorable as well. Man must accept these laws and adjust his way of living to them. Then only can he prosper. ~ Lois Lenski

Fortune, in fact, is a pestilent shrew, and, withal, an inexorable creditor; and though for a time she may be all smiles and courtesies, and indulge us in long credits, yet sooner or later she brings up her arrears with a vengeance, and washes out her scores with our tears. ~ Washington Irving

An almost inexorable baseball law: A Red Sox ship with a single leak will always find a way to sink No team is worshipped with such a perverse sense of fatality. ~ Thomas Boswell

Sir,' I interrupted him, 'you are inexorable for that unfortunate lady; you speak of her with hate
with vindictive antipathy. It is cruel
she cannot help being mad. ~ Charlotte Bronte