“When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”

This wry quote by 18th-century writer Samuel Johnson immediately establishes one of the novel’s major themes, The Importance of Living Life to the Fullest. The novel’s key message is that understanding one’s mortality is needed to embrace life and joy.

“Fate won’t be fought.”

This favorite saying of Cherry Lockwood’s mother, the fortune teller who calls herself Madame Mae, touches on The Tension Between Free Will and Destiny. Mae’s belief that everything in life is predestined contrasts with Cherry’s belief in free will. However, Moriarty uses Cherry’s first-person musings, her dialogues with her mother, and the accurate predictions of Mae and the psychic Luca to show that free will and destiny can coexist.

“Everything is caused by something else: a preceding action, event, or situation.”

A man at a party makes this statement about determinism, or the idea that everything that happens is “causally inevitable,” to describe Cherry’s mother. Another guest at the party discusses free will, something in which Cherry passionately believes. The Tension Between Free Will and Destiny is never resolved in the novel.