"Fate keeps on happening"
About this Quote
"Fate keeps on happening" lands like a shrug with a razor in it. Anita Loos, who made a career out of watching people dress up self-interest as destiny, compresses an entire worldview into four plain words: the universe doesn’t need your belief to keep moving, and your narratives don’t get veto power.
The intent is anti-romantic in the best way. Fate, in most literary traditions, arrives with trumpets: prophecy, tragedy, cosmic justice. Loos strips it of ceremony. "Keeps on happening" sounds like the weather or the mail - relentless, ordinary, almost boring. That’s the joke and the bite. If fate is constant, it’s less a grand plan than a steady pressure, forcing choices while pretending not to. The line also undercuts the favorite modern fantasy that awareness equals control. You can be enlightened, cynical, well-read, and fate will still clock in for its shift.
Subtextually, Loos is also poking at the way people use "fate" as an alibi. If fate is always happening, you don’t get to invoke it only when convenient - after a bad marriage, a lucky break, a moral compromise. The phrase implicates the speaker: you’re in the stream, too, and the current doesn’t care how witty you are.
Context matters: Loos wrote through industrial modernity, two world wars, Hollywood’s dream factory, and the churn of consumer culture. In that century of mass events and manufactured stories, "fate" isn’t a mythic figure; it’s the ongoing collision of desire, money, and accident. The brilliance is how casually she tells you: it won’t stop.
The intent is anti-romantic in the best way. Fate, in most literary traditions, arrives with trumpets: prophecy, tragedy, cosmic justice. Loos strips it of ceremony. "Keeps on happening" sounds like the weather or the mail - relentless, ordinary, almost boring. That’s the joke and the bite. If fate is constant, it’s less a grand plan than a steady pressure, forcing choices while pretending not to. The line also undercuts the favorite modern fantasy that awareness equals control. You can be enlightened, cynical, well-read, and fate will still clock in for its shift.
Subtextually, Loos is also poking at the way people use "fate" as an alibi. If fate is always happening, you don’t get to invoke it only when convenient - after a bad marriage, a lucky break, a moral compromise. The phrase implicates the speaker: you’re in the stream, too, and the current doesn’t care how witty you are.
Context matters: Loos wrote through industrial modernity, two world wars, Hollywood’s dream factory, and the churn of consumer culture. In that century of mass events and manufactured stories, "fate" isn’t a mythic figure; it’s the ongoing collision of desire, money, and accident. The brilliance is how casually she tells you: it won’t stop.
Quote Details
| Topic | Free Will & Fate |
|---|
More Quotes by Anita
Add to List
