Quotes About Happened

Had the Holocaust happened in Tahiti or the Congo, as it has; had it happened in South America, as it has; had it happened in the West Indies, as it has - you must remember that within fifty years of Columbus's arrival, only the bones remained of the people called the Arawaks, with one or two of them in Spain as specimens. Had the Holocaust committed under the Nazis happened somewhere else, we wouldn't be talking about it the way we talk about it.

Here I come to one of the memoir writer's difficulties -- one of the reasons why, though I read so many, so many are failures. They leave out the person to whom things happened. The reason is that it is so difficult to describe any human being. So they say: 'This is what happened'; but they do not say what the person was like to whom it happened. And the events mean very little unless we know first to whom they happened.

Love happened. She would have never thought that it could happen so rapidly. Love was something you worked at, and she had no doubt their relationship would take a lot of hard work and dedication. But it had simply happened. No explanation. No cataclysmic event or earth-shattering revelation brought on by some external event. It had simply happened.

Something may have happened before, and yet this thing that happened just after may be so important that you don't even know about the thing that happened before and when you tell your story to yourself, or to someone else, it's going to be told not on the basis necessarily of the time course, but rather on the basis of how it was valued by you.

History is not merely what happened. It is what happened in the context of what might have happened.

There is a real attempt to sanitize the CIA killings and to glorify the CIA and to give it a new face. That's what happened with Zero Dark Thirty, that's what happened with Michelle Obama... When she appeared my jaw dropped; I couldn't believe it... These were really a disgusting propaganda films, glorifying the role of the CIA.

I think of the described dynamics as a fluid negotiation. I don't think these specific interactions can happen to the black or brown body without the white body. And there are ways in which, if you say, "Oh, this happened to me," then the white body can say, "Well, it happened to her and it has nothing to do with me." But if it says "you," that you is an apparent part of the encounter.

Okay, that really shouldn't have happened. And we’re not going to talk about that, right? Ever?” “Right,” she said. She felt like there was light dripping from her fingertips. Spilling out of her toes. She felt full of light, in fact, warm buttery sunlight. “Never happened.” He opened his mouth, then closed it, and closed his eyes. “Claire—” “I know.” “Lock the door,” he said.

For myself music definitely informs my emotions. And I can literally play a song that will get me where I need to be emotionally. I don't have to think about the tragic things that happened in my life or the greatest things that happened in my life.

He has denied what has happened. His sworn statements have denied what has happened.

And my career, the things that have happened have happened because of my music education background.

I'm interested in memory because it's a filter through which we see our lives, and because it's foggy and obscure, the opportunities for self-deception are there. In the end, as a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.

History isn't just what happened, but what happened to whom and why and what would have been different if the cast of characters had been different.

All of a sudden America wasn't about hamburgers and hot rods anymore. It was about the Mayflower and Plymouth Rock. It was about something that had happened for two minutes four hundred years ago, instead of everything that had happened since. Instead of everything that was happening now!

The equivocations, the confusions, the contradictions. There's no way we can live through or comprehend something so big that happened so long ago. We've lost true history. But if we are willing to tolerate the contradictions, and if we suffer through events rather than ticking them off, we may at least get closer to understanding what happened than if we grip the handrail of a carefully polished and reassuringly heroic narrative.

In the future, when something comes up, you tell exactly how it happened but write down for yourself the way you think it should have happened. Tell the truth and write the story. Then you won't get mixed up. It was the best advice Francie every got.

What happened in Kosovo was the exact reversal of what happened in 'Fortress Europe' in 1943-45. Let me explain. Air Marshall 'Bomber' Harris used to say that 'Fortress Europe' was a fortress without a roof, since the Allies had air supremacy. Now, if we look at the Kosovo War, what do we see? We see a fortress without walls  but with a roof! Isn't that disappearance extraordinary?!

Never have doubted it, even when the plane crash happened. I wasn't mad at God. I just knew that there was a reason that I didn't know about why it happened.

You don't have to understand why anything that has happened nor do you even have to understand what it is that has happened. You have only to live with the remains.

I want to know why this is such a part of me. I want to know why this thing that happened to other people has happened so much to me. I keep looking for the lesson.

the past is not only that which happened but also that which could have happened but did not.

Unhappy am I because this has happened to me.- Not so, but happy am I, though this has happened to me, because I continue free from pain, neither crushed by the present nor fearing the future.

There is no past. That's another illusion. Everything that has ever happened to you, to me, to anyone in this world, happened in the present moment. That's all there ever is. So your relationship to life isn't your relationship to your past, it's your relationship to the present moment.

I could remember the details as if it had happened yesterday, even though it was hard to believe some of it had happened at all. Funerals were tricky like that. And life, I guess. The important parts you blocked out altogether, but the random, slanted moments haunted you, replaying over and over in your mind.

Comforting someone when they were stricken with loss was something else. It meant commitment. It meant caring. It meant you wanted to ease their pain, and at the same time you were thanking God that whatever the bad thing was that had happened, it hadn't happened to them.

Fiction is often a much-needed step back that gives you the distance to see things more clearly; it's very often better at explaining why events happened as opposed to just what happened.

The notion of representing a sound by a graphic symbol is itself so stupefying a leap of the imagination that what is remarkable is not so much that it happened relatively late in human history, but that it happened at all.

I feel like my career has always been a series of collisions and accidents. Being in the right place at the right time. Having the right haircut. It's so mad to think that it happened in the way that it happened.

We're not in the area where the alleged chemical attack happened. I said alleged. We're not sure that anything happened.

The Sixties was a perfect storm of disaffection with political leaders trying to pass off the same old platitudes to maintain the status quo and an unexpected courageousness in the masses of youth. Nothing on this scale had ever happened before in U.S. history and it hasn't happened since.

Don't talk to me about what's happened since [Nelson] Mandela! His successor was absolutely hopeless - "no such thing as AIDS" - and this present President... It's a tragedy, you know, what's happened there post-Mandela, because he was an iconic figure.

Welfare reform happened with reconciliation; half the Democrats voted for it. The Bush tax cuts happened with reconciliation; twelve Democratic Senators voted for it. You didn't have a real partisan issue on those times that it was used

What happened to the Soviet Union happened mainly for domestic reasons. It was a failure of the model based on a command economy and dictatorship. The rejection of freedom and democracy, the decisionmaking monopoly of one party, and the monopoly of one ideology all had a chilling effect on the country. That model turned out to be incapable of making structural changes. It did not open up ways for initiative and was overly centralized.

You look at what happened to the priest over the weekend in Paris, where his throat was cut, 85-year-old, beloved Catholic priest. You look at what happened in Nice, France, a couple of weeks ago. I would say, you gotta take a look that, because something is going on, and it's not good.

Common sense, to me, is simple. And I've never understood why there aren't a lot of people trying to figure out how the United States became this special place and then try to replicate it around the world, because that's the solution to the human condition. The solution to poverty, the solution to misery, the solution to backwards living is the United States of America. Why not learn how that happened, learn why and how we happened. What is it that made it special?

As far as many statistical series that are related to activities of mankind are concerned, the date that divides human history into two equal parts is well within living memory. The world of today is as different from the world I was born in as that world was from Julius Caesar s. I was born in the middle of human history, to date, roughly. Almost as much has happened since I was born as happened before.

There was only the dark infinity in which nothing was. And something happened. At the distance of a star something happened, and everything began. The Word did not come into being, but it was. It did not break upon the silence, but it was older than the silence and the silence was made of it.

No looking back. Life goes one way only, and whatever opinions you hold about the past having nothing to do with anything but your own damn weakness. Nothing changes what already happened. It will always have happened. You either let it break you down or you don't.

With my friends, it was always essentially true stories. That's how I always felt about doing King-Cat. This is something that really happened, whether it makes me look good or bad, or someone else look good or bad. This is what happened, and it's my job in life to write it down. Nowadays, I'm a lot more conscientious about it. I'm not out to attack somebody in print.

I don't think there's such a thing as autobiographical fiction. If I say it happened, it happened, even if only in my mind.

Every story would be another story, and unrecognizable if it took up its characters and plot and happened somewhere else ... Fiction depends for its life on place. Place is the crossroads of circumstance, the proving ground of, What happened? Who's here? Who's coming?

If such a thing had happened once, it must surely have happened many times in this galaxy of a hundred billion suns.

As a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.

Oh, Eeyore, you are wet!” said Piglet, feeling him. Eeyore shook himself, and asked somebody to explain to Piglet what happened when you had been inside a river for quite a long time.

What happens in a certain place can stain your feelings for that location, just as ink can stain a white sheet. You can wash it, and wash it, and still never forget what has transpired - a word which here means 'happened, and made everybody sad'.

I would like to talk about some of the things that happened that made me know that there was something wrong in the south from a child.

And so it happened again, the daily miracle whereby interiority opens out and brings to bloom the million-petalled flower of being here, in the world, with other people. Neither as hard as she had thought it might be nor as easy as it appeared.

We had shot six episodes of the West Wing season when 9/11 happened. An extraordinary thing that would never happen today is Aaron going to the network and saying, "I think we need to go back and reshoot, I have something I want to do," and the network just kind of let him do it.