Destiny Quote by Megan Marshall

“Margaret described an oppressive awareness that “I have no real hold on life,—no real, permanent connection with any soul.” She felt disembodied, like “a wandering Intelligence, driven from spot to spot.” Perhaps her fate was this: to live alone, to “learn all secrets, and fulfil a circle of…” quote by Megan Marshall — Download Open image

““Margaret described an oppressive awareness that “I have no real hold on life,—no real, permanent connection with any soul.” She felt disembodied, like “a wandering Intelligence, driven from spot to spot.” Perhaps her fate was this: to live alone, to “learn all secrets, and fulfil a circle of knowledge,” but never to experience full communion with another being. The prospect “envelopes me as a cold atmosphere. I do not see how I shall go through this destiny. I can, if it is mine; but I do not feel that I can.””

Megan Marshall

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“The expansion of their dyad to include the “young people” gave both Margaret and Waldo hope of more: “of being often & often shined on & rained on by these influences of being steeped in this light & so ripened to power whereof I yet dreamed not,” Waldo rhapsodized, “suddenly uplifted” by the notion, foreign to him since Ellen’s death,…

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“A man’s idea of God corresponds to his ideal of himself. The nobler he is, the more exalted his God.”

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“Yet “Platonic affection” can only seem “sublimated and idealized to the more experienced.” It was a painful message for Margaret, an unmarried woman with no romantic prospects but with a deep need for connection with men. Yet there it was: there could be no turning back to the Platonic after a “thorough” experience of passion. Worse, her quest for Platonic…

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“And there was a fourth, “highest grade” of marriage, which included the best features of the others, “home sympathies” and “intellectual communion,” but added to these a “religious” dimension, “expressed as a pilgrimage towards a common shrine.” Margaret was careful to specify that by “religion” she meant “the thirst for truth and good, not the love of sect and dogma.”…

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“It was in Horace Greeley that Margaret recognized a “go-ahead, fearless adroitness” that was simply “American.” Waldo’s deprecatory assessment that Greeley was “no scholar,” but rather a “mother of men . . . an abettor,” captured the very reasons Margaret quickly warmed to the tall, unkempt newspaperman, whose thick wire-rimmed glasses, settled unsteadily on his ruddy baby face, were the only hint…

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“It was not just her unusual intellect and outsized personality that made Margaret seem to Waldo more manly than feminine, but also her anomalous position as a woman “of the bread-winning tribe” who earned her keep as a writer and public speaker, her rate of pay approaching his own. Margaret was Waldo’s female double, not his feminine muse, as Cary…

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“She had made the observation several years before to a startled Waldo Emerson that “women are Slaves.” Married women in particular—and that meant most American women—were, in countless legal and emotional respects, the property of their husbands. Their liberation, however, was not to be found in a political movement, Margaret believed, but in reform of themselves as individuals,”

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“Why do women love bad men? Margaret had asked the question herself, and answered it, in Woman in the Nineteenth Century. The belief that men have “stronger passions,” Margaret theorized, has been “inculcated” in women for centuries, and “the preference often shown by women for bad men arises . . . from a confused idea that they are bold and adventurous, acquainted…

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“long as man “has the physical power, as well as the conventional” to treat a woman “like a play-thing or a slave,” she’d written…

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“But she worried about how the older students, who were required to leave the school at age twelve, would find work. Many of these…

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“Elizabeth Bishop wrote love poems, and poems about lovemaking, and one of the best poems ever written in English about the loss of love, but she had made her way through life as an orphan, a solitary. Reticence wasn’t the reason she’d become a poet of the self—of a singular “mind in action,” as she’d once described the effect she…

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More Destiny quotes

... War on the destiny of man! Doom on the sun! Before death takes you, O take back this.

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Anatomy is destiny.

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“You are destiny for greatness. Your future is in the hands of the Lord.”

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“To be a Sufi is to detach from fixed ideas and from preconceptions; and not to try to avoid what is your lot.”

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Man blindly works the will of fate. [Ger., Blindlings that er blos den Willen des Geschickes.]

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There are times when we can feel destiny close around us like a fist around a doorknob. Sure, we can resist. But a knob that won't turn, a door that sticks and never budges, is a nuisance to the gods. The gods may kick in the jamb. Worse, they may walk away in disgust, leaving us to hang dumbly from…

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“It's morning now, and I miss the soft rasp of her voice already. Ugh. I'm in trouble, aren't I?”

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You can't choose what stays and what stays away.

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“Failing to meet your true destiny is a tragic act of free will.”

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Somehow destiny comes into play. These children end up with you and you end up with them. It's something quite magical.

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“In that instant it all seemed to come clear to him- it came in a grisly flash of light, and he realized that the vote they had taken as children was a joke. There was no turning back, never had been. They were on a track as preordained as the memory-track which had caused him to look up when he…

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