The Echo of His Character and Passions, His Mistakes and Weaknesses

　　“Maybe we don’t need to see the Archduke,” said Hassan.

　　“We’re on a road trip. It’s about adventure,” Colin mimicked.

　　“Do you think the people of Gutshot, Tennessee, have ever seen an actual, living Arab?”

　　“Oh, don’t be so paranoid.”

　　“Or for that matter do you think they’ve ever seen a Jew-fro?”

　　Colin thought that over for a moment, and then said, “Well, the woman at Hardee’s was nice to us.”

　　“Right, but the woman at Hardee’s called Gutshot ‘the sticks,’” Hassan said, imitating the woman’s accent. “I mean, if Hardee’s is urban, I’m not sure I want to see rural.” Hassan rolled on with his diatribe, and Colin laughed and smiled at all the right places, but he just kept driving, calculating the odds that the Archduke, who died in Sarajevo more than ninety years before, and who’d randomly popped into Colin’s brain the previous night, would end up between Colin and wherever he was heading. It was irrational, and Colin hated thinking irrationally, but he couldn’t help but wonder whether perhaps being in the presence of the Archduke might reveal something to Colin about his missing piece. But of course the universe does not conspire to put you in one place rather than another, Colin knew. He thought of Democritus: “Everywhere man blames nature and fate, yet his fate is mostly but the echo of his character and passions, his mistakes and weaknesses.”15

　　And so it was not fate, but Colin Singleton’s character and passions, his mistakes and weaknesses, that finally brought him to Gutshot, Tennessee — POPULATION 864, as the roadside sign read. At first, Gutshot looked like everything that came before it, only with a better-paved road. On each side of the Hearse, fields of squat, luminously green plants stretched out into a gray forever, broken up only by the occasional horse pasture, barn, or stand of trees. Eventually, Colin saw before him on the side of the road a two-story cinder-block building painted a ghastly pink.

　　“I think that’s Gutshot,” he said, nodding toward the building.

　　……

An Abundance of Katherines, P28-29
John Green
ISBN 978-0-14-241070-7