Top 100 How It Happened Quotes
#1. But it seems that something has happened that has never happened before: though we know not just when, or why, or how, or where.
T. S. Eliot
#2. But if something did happen, it happened. Whether it's right or wrong. I accept everything that happens, and that's how I became the person I am now.
Haruki Murakami
#3. Maybe that was what happened when people grew up in a place where mountains shut them in, kept everything turned inward, buffered them from everything else. How long did it take before that landscape become internalized, was passed down from generation to generation like blood type or eye color?
Ron Rash
#4. [With quantum computers] you can calculate how many bits are in the universe, how much energy it takes to flip them, how much energy exists, and use that to rule out lots of things about the universe's history. Anything that takes more bit flips couldn't have happened.
Seth Lloyd
#5. It's been interesting how kids have had hardly any problems watching it, but adults have more trouble. This happened way back even with Jabberwocky and Time Bandits.
Terry Gilliam
#6. Is everything funny? For me, yes. There's a positive to every negative. Even my divorce? For me, yes. If you go back and look at it, why it happened or how it happened, there's something in there that'll make you laugh.
Kevin Hart
#7. I'll tell you how it happened. The phone rang. Paul, my agent, goes, 'Would you like to play Meryl Streep's?' I said, 'Yeeees! I'll do it, whatever it is.' He said, 'It's Mamma Mia!.' I said, 'Oh no, which character? The fat friend?
Julie Walters
#8. Ironically, being a coach on 'The Voice' and spending time with those kids, Xenia and Dia especially, I learned a lot about myself. It reminded me how lucky I am that this happened for me, and it kind of lit the spark inside me again for my love of music.
Blake Shelton
#9. Jews read the books of Moses not just as history but as divine command. The question to which they are an answer is not, 'What happened?' but rather, 'How then shall I live?' And it's only with the exodus that the life of the commands really begins.
Jonathan Sacks
#10. I never look forward, because I have no idea about how any of it happened to getting here. I've no idea how the next five years are going to be.
Paul McCartney
#11. Scottish men of a certain age have a black response to almost everything as a measure of how sophisticated they are. I have a very long fuse that eventually explodes after building up a nice head of steam, although it's only happened three times - usually at work when someone takes me for granted.
Peter Capaldi
#12. Sometimes everything changes and you're left wondering how it happened and where you could have down shifted.
Shey Stahl
#13. I honestly don't remember how I wrote or did the songs. Or the sessions. They all become very much a blur. And each album is like that. It may be that there are different locations, it may take longer, shorter, or whatever, but it's always something that just happened.
Lenny Kravitz
#14. How could such a thing have happened? Everything that seemed so important back then - Naoko, and the self I was then, and the world I had then: where could they have all gone? It's true, I can't even bring back Naoko's face - not right away, at least.
Haruki Murakami
#15. Apparently, I've grown a conscience. I don't know when it happened. I don't know how it happened, but I'm not happy about it.
If I could, I would squash that Jiminy Cricket fucker like the roach he is.
Emma Chase
#16. You can lose a game but, I see guys every week including myself, you lose a game, it's a tough loss, you're down, two weeks later you forgot about it. You know it's amazing how down you were, but all of the sudden you're like it never happened.
Brett Favre
#17. I hate myself that I wasn't there for him. I hate that I could not feel it in him. How could I not know what had happened? How could I not hear it in his voice, his comments, or in his demeanor? He needed my help, and I couldn't feel it.
Melissa Seligman
#18. Curious, sometimes, how one's thoughts seemed to swing in a kaleidoscope. It happened to me now. A bewildering shuffling and reshuffling of memories, of events. Then the mosaic settled into its true pattern.
Agatha Christie
#19. I don't think I'll ever fully get over losing the city council seat. I don't know how that happened. But it was less than 1 percent out of 50,000 votes. I'd put in six or seven years into changing L.A.
Tom Hayden
#20. I honestly don't even know how I got into acting. It happened so quickly because my mom and sister used to do commercials, and apparently when I was little I would unbuckle myself from the stroller and crash their auditions.
Bailee Madison
#21. I got so lucky on my 'Red Widow' cast. It was just the universe looking out for me that I got those actors. It's a big ensemble cast, a very international cast. I don't know how that happened.
Melissa Rosenberg
#22. To tell one comprehensive story of how it has happened that what is is, one which shall hold true, come what may, now-after - a story that whatever comes shall perfectly continue or confirm: such is the ideal motive of religions.
Laura Riding
#23. How the human system is happening, in the same way the universe has happened. In the same way that the micro is happening, that is how the macro has happened. If you look at the micro and perceive it, you will also know existence.
Jaggi Vasudev
#24. Bad things happened, it was how we navigated the fallout afterward that really defined what our new normal would be.
Jay Crownover
#25. but it is the waiting that is unbearable, this suspension of time when something has not yet happened and where we feel how very useless it is to struggle
Muriel Barbery
#26. I was vaguely aware that people used to hijack planes to Cuba. But I didn't know much about how often it happened and what the motives were. I started looking into what was going on back then, and I was blown away by how common hijacking once was.
Brendan I. Koerner
#27. I think it's a very healthy thing to learn from what's happened in the past. But only if you look at what happened and think, 'How could I have dealt with that differently?' Then let it go.
Chris Pine
#28. How can you think that? How can you believe God would let us go through this hell?" "Because you have to think of the alternative. If it hadn't happened the way it did, you'd have been on that plane. You'd really be gone now. There'd be no second chances. There'd be no Reed.
Elisabeth Naughton
#29. Lesbianism is so rampant in some of the schools in southeast Oklahoma that they'll only let one girl go to the bathroom. Now think about it. Think about that issue. How is it that that's happened to us?
Tom Coburn
#30. It's not always the case that things will fall into your lap or that life will be great, but it's all about perspective and having a positive outlook. If something goes wrong you say: "That happened for a reason, what can I learn from that and how can I grow?"
Chris Pine
#31. He watched the scene and thought of life; and (as always happened when he thought of life) he became sad. A gentle melancholy took possession of him. He felt how useless it was to struggle against fortune, this being the burden of wisdom which the ages had bequeathed him.
James Joyce
#32. However long, it's definitely the presence of other people that brings out the weirdness - that collision of your own way of being with the everyday lives of others, the abrupt awareness - always a surprise no matter how often it's happened - that their lives are very different from your own.
Lynn Coady
#33. I'm not sorry it happened," she told him.
Doran turned to meet her eyes, shaking his head as he took her face in his palm. "Me neither," he said. "I'm sorry how it happened.
Melissa Landers
#34. Violence was just as much about WHAT was happening as it was how it happened.
Walter Dean Myers
#35. So grown women could smell it again, that chemical, flowery fug. That's how badly people wanted it - to know that their lives had happened, that the person they once had been still existed inside of them. There
Emma Cline
#36. If many regard Islam as a religion of the sword, Muslims down through the ages have spoken of the West's Crusader mentality and ambitions. Therefore for Muslim-Christian relations, it is less a case of what actually happened in the Crusades than how they are remembered.
Sven Lange
#37. I hope you make it through law school still feeling like you do.' 'Why wouldn't I?' I asked him. And he answered, 'Sometimes you start off going one way and you eng up going another way and you don't know how it happened.
Francisco X Stork
#38. It's not until you're older that you realise how important the things that happened to you when you were a kid are. Even things you only half remember.
Sara Sheridan
#39. You pray and pray and pray and nothing changes, like for example I prayed for a real house and good clothes and a bicycle and things for a long, long, time, and none of it happened, not even one little thing, which is how I know that all this praying for Father is just people playing.
NoViolet Bulawayo
#40. I really didn't think this was going to happen. I thought bad things only happened to people with hubris. They don't happen to people like me, people that know how fragile life is, people that respect the authority of a higher power. But it has. It has happened to me.
Taylor Jenkins Reid
#41. How does the past ambush us? How can we be accurate about what happened, how can we be true to it? And can war be declared over? And can we ever evolve from the notion of war, of nations, of us versus them?
Michael Winter
#42. You may think it's a wonderful thing to be saved by Lord Frith in his power. How many rabbits has that happened to, I wonder? But I tell you, it was far more frightening than being chased by the Efrafans.
Richard Adams
#43. It was tragic how life had sucked her down to the bones, all her spontaneity her laughter and freedom had vanished. I knew then that I didn't ever want to be like that. Whatever happened, life was something too precious to give up on so easily.
Belinda Jeffrey
#44. How unlucky I am that this should happen to me. But not at all. Perhaps, say how lucky I am that I am not broken by what has happened, and I am not afraid of what is about to happen. For the same blow might have stricken anyone, but not many would have absorbed it without capitulation and complaint.
Marcus Aurelius
#45. What has happened to us? It seems as if we have perverted our freedom, our rights into license, into being irresponsible. Perhaps we did not realise just how apartheid has damaged us so that we seem to have lost our sense of right and wrong.
Desmond Tutu
#46. I'm not first and foremost interested in story and the what-happens, but I'm interested in who's telling it and how they're telling it and the effects of whatever happened on the characters and the people.
Amy Hempel
#47. I've thought a lot about how if something horrible happened, and if it were like 'The Road' situation, I've decided I don't want to survive past the death of society as we know it.
Gillian Jacobs
#48. Maybe this is how it happened first for everyone - adults promising us their own failed future.
Jacqueline Woodson
#49. And at the time, it is funny how you can look at something and say, for example with my shoulder injury, when it first happened I said this is the worst thing that could happen to me. Why me, why now? Now I look back and say it was probably the best thing that happened to me.
Drew Brees
#50. Once you come up with a premise, you have to work out how it all happened. It's a bit like coming up with a spectacular roof design first. Before you can get it up there, you need to build a solid foundation and supporting structure.
Linwood Barclay
#51. But all this happened for one basic reason: no matter how many detours and adjustments it made, the caravan moved toward the same compass point. Once obstacles were overcome, it returned to its course, sighting on a star that indicated the location of the oasis.
Paulo Coelho
#52. How can they walk around in the hallways at school like nothing happened? Like they didn't witness - " My voice dissolves into tears again. "A crime?" Lindsey says without moving. "Yeah." "They don't think it was a crime," she says quietly.
Aaron Hartzler
#53. I wrote a play before that and it never saw the light of day. And then I started working on this play and it came out really quickly. Eventually I got it, and I wrote a letter to Sarah Jessica Parker and she wanted to do it. So that's how it happened.
Amanda Peet
#55. Cameron's mind registered what the rest of him already knew. He was insane about this woman, and he'd do anything to be with her, anything to protect her. She'd become his world. How it had happened, he didn't know, but it had.
Lisa Carlisle
#56. The point about positive thinking, and later cognitive behavioural therapy, was that you could choose how you thought about life, and that how you thought about it changed not only your interpretation of what happened, but also the actual course of events.
Jenny Alexander
#57. I'm a memoir writer. I try to understand the world by taking experiences I have and making them into a story, whether it's a narrative memoir, blogging for The Huffington Post, writing poems, or talking on the screen about what has happened to me and how that relates to the world at large.
Staceyann Chin
#58. The nice thing about the Bible is it doesn't give you too many facts. Two an a half lines and it tells you the whole story and that leaves you a great deal of freedom to elaborate on how it might have happened.
Howard Nemerov
#59. Somehow, we both got carried away. I don't know exactly how it happened, but before long, I knew nothing was ever going to be the same.
Brenda Perlin
#60. How did I become a star? I don't know how it happened. When I look at my old pictures, I can't tell how it happened!
Fatty Arbuckle
#61. I wanted to say something to him about regret, about how I didn't really believe in the idea of regret because it was always based on what might have happened. People always held up the now, the concrete now, and compared it to what might have been, and that wasn't a fair comparison.
Kim Culbertson
#62. Grace headed in desperation for the coffeemaker. Apparently it was going to be one of those mornings. Funny how often those happened after a short night's sleep.
Thea Harrison
#63. How had it happened, Simon thought, that he was bound to these people - to people who thought of him as nothing more than a Downworlder, half human at best?
Cassandra Clare
#64. It had not occurred to anybody in the crowd - that simple trick of inquiring about somebody who wasn't ten thousand miles away. The magician was hit hard; it was an emergency that had never happened in his experience before, and it corked him; he didn't know how to meet it.
Mark Twain
#65. Damn it," he mumbled apologetically, "things like this never happened to Vorthalia the Bold."
She raised a thoughtful eyebrow. "How do you know? The histories of those times were all written by minstrels and poets. You try and think of a word that rhymes with 'bleeding ulcer
Lois McMaster Bujold
#66. And trying to break it down this way, to minor and major offenses, maybes and what-ifs, was like arguing over the origin of cracks in a broken egg. It was done. How it happened didn't matter anymore.
Sarah Dessen
#67. I've grown up with a piano in the house, and that's where I started to be able to learn things by ear. Guitar kind of happened, and I was using it just for writing at first. Then, I was writing so much that I began to realise that I knew how to play, and that's when I started getting nerdy about it.
Gabrielle Aplin
#68. The silence was killing me.
And that's all there ever was. Silence. It was all I knew. Keep quiet. Pretend nothing had happened, that nothing was wrong. And look how well that was turning out.
J. Lynn
#69. What scares me is how easily it happened.
Mark Recchi
#70. It's not about what you've done; it's how you've experienced whatever has happened to you. Matt Lawrence in The Overachievers
Alexandra Robbins
#71. We didn't evolve; God made us. So I just want to explain to you exactly how that happened ... Some of the things you'll hear do sound a little bit far-fetched. I admit that. Then I found out that the other name for The Bible is The Gospel, so it is all true. Luckily, the clue is in the title.
Ricky Gervais
#72. I'm always fascinated with how a person becomes a good quality person, a productive person, and how it happened to me, because I was a terror.
Aaron Eckhart
#73. I wasn't even going to do acting. I don't know how it even happened, to be honest. I was going to go into psychology or something like that. Or business. And then some moment of madness took over and I decided, 'Oh, I'm gonna go to London and try to be an actor.'
Amrita Acharia
#74. No matter how hard you try, there are some things that we can't force it to happen. It happens when it happens. And that's how it happened.
Ariff Adly
#75. Do not permit yourself to fall in love with the end-game play to the exclusion of entire games. It is well to have the whole story of how it happened; the complete play, not the denouement only. Do not embrace the rag-time and vaudeville of chess.
Emanuel Lasker
#76. What might have happened to them to make them the way they were? It did not change what they now did, but it changed, profoundly, how he perceived their motivations, their place in the world.
Sherwood Smith
#77. When you are so ashamed of your actions, thoughts, or intentions, you lie rather than accepting yourself for who you really are - or, in this case, pretend something happened when it didn't. The idea of how others see you becomes more important than the reality of you.
Michael J. Sullivan
#78. I don't know how it happened. Nobody does. There are only theories, empty rhetoric and doomsday prophecies. None of them are right, but none of them are completely wrong, either. They all have a grain of truth. All I know is where I was and what I was doing when it happened.
Summer Lane
#79. The recollection of how, when and where it all happened became vague as the lingering strains hung in the rafters of the studio. I wanted to shout back at it, Maybe I didn't write you, but I found you.
Hoagy Carmichael
#80. Why it is that life can change so quickly?"
"How it's possible for a heart to stop beating so suddenly, instantly breaking all the hearts that were ever connected to it? But the truth is there is no sense in what happened to Jarrod. None that I can see. I wish I had a better answer, but I don't.
Samantha Young
#81. Like when you scrape your knee and you get a scar, but then the
scar fades so much that no one can see it but you. But you know where it is. Cuz you remember what caused it. And
no matter how hard you try, you can never forget how bad it hurt when it first happened.
Alyson Noel
#82. Life was life. It happened. You never knew what was going to come at you. Or how you could defend yourself.
Barbara Taylor Bradford
#83. Love always won in the end. No matter how it happened, no matter what it took, no matter what it meant. Fair or not, true or not, love won.
B.J. Novak
#84. People have asked me, 'Is it about Apple or is it about Jobs?' and I say it's about how a man becomes his company and the company becomes the man. That has only happened a few times, like it happened with Ford, I think, they became inextricably linked together.
Joshua Michael Stern
#85. Why can we remember the tiniest detail that has happened to us, and not remember how many times we have told it to the same person.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld
#86. Never spoke of it. He took the miracle to his grave. All Andrew ever said about the voyage was that a nun had taught him how to play mah-jongg. Something must have happened during one of their games.
John Irving
#87. I wish it was clear for me how it happened [stop writing songs], then maybe I could start writing again. But it's kind of an "it." It just submerged itself. Because the way I had always written was just that it came out. It just happened.
Joan Baez
#88. I'm a good liar," he told me once with a grin. Once, he said, "Even if she did check, the thing with Rachel is, she won't remember what happened tomorrow anyway." That's when I started to realize just how bad things were for him. It
Paula Hawkins
#89. They say, you know, about evolution, it surely happened because their fossil record shows that. Look, my body and your body are miracles of design. Scientists are pretending they have the answer as how we got this way when natural selection couldn't possibly have produced such machines.
Kurt Vonnegut
#90. I had amazing stuff happen right off the top. I thought this was how it worked. Hollywood is awesome! Cut to three years later: What happened?
Dana Fox
#91. I don't give a shit how it happened, the window is broken ... Wait, why is there syrup everywhere? Okay, you know what? Now I give a shit how it happened, Let's hear it.
Justin Halpern
#92. Performance is there, and if you are not there in that moment it happened, it just stays in the memory. It's so immaterial and something this immaterial is very difficult to collect. Its difficult to buy, its how we can buy immaterial art.
Marina Abramovic
#93. I knew I was gone for you. Don't know how it happened, just know it did.
Kristen Ashley
#94. I look at my career and it's still hard for me to believe the way things turned out and how things happened. I've been so blessed.
John Elway
#95. But the trouble with falling in love was that it was involuntary, no matter how well you knew it was a bad idea, if it was going to happen, it happened, and you couldn't prevent it, however much you wanted to.
Katie Fforde
#96. Heaven is supposed to be a perfect place. Yet, it experienced a war (Revelation 12:7). How can there be a war in a perfect place and if it happened before why couldn't it happen again? Why would I want to go to a place in which war can occur? That's exactly what I'm trying to escape, aren't you?
Dennis McKinsey
#97. This kiss ... I'm gone. Gone. I know in that moment, that I belong to him. It's what he said: I'm his. How it happened, I don't know. I really wish I did.
Jasinda Wilder
#98. How much sweeter life would be if it all happened in reverse, if, after decades of disappointments, you finally arrived at an age when you had conceded nothing, when everything was possible.
Karen Thompson Walker
#99. Being temporary doesn't make something matter any less, because the point isn't for how long, the point is that it happened.
Robyn Schneider
#100. Two hugs. Both I can't get out of my mind. One was so quick I'm not even sure it happened, and the other was ... Amazing. Incredible. Confusing. How can someone get so much from a hug?
Becca Ann
