Quotes & Sayings About Things Happening In Time

In I went to John Bickel's office. We hit it off instantly. I did something all job applicants should do - I asked for the job. I told him that if they extended an offer, I would accept it on the spot, that I had done the research and investigation, and this was where I wanted to be. Don't underestimate the power this message can have on a potential employer. Everyone likes to be flattered. Of course it works better if it's true. I left the office cautiously optimistic. That night, between my ridiculously soft sheets, with that feeling of a new city around me and a new beginning on the horizon, I stared at the ceiling and felt elated at the possibilities. Things were happening that could alter the course of my life. One step at a time, I was starting to run. I hadn't grown up with high hopes for my future, but in that moment I had a sense of opportunity knocking, of imagining that I might actually be able to make something out of my life. — Megyn Kelly

People have the illusion that all over the world, all the time, all kinds of fantastic things are happening. When in fact, over most of the world, most of the time, nothing is happening. — David Brinkley

I'm from the Midwest, and I loved my family. I had a very good time as a child, but I was also - I have a theory about Jews growing up in the Midwest, that there is an ultimately sort of wonderful avoidance of a lot of things, and a great acceptance of whatever is happening. — Bob Balaban

Patience from a Buddhist perspective is not a "wait and see" attitude, but rather one of "just be there" ... Patience can also be based on not expecting anything.Think of patience as an act of being open to whatever comes your way. When you begin to solidify expectations, you get frustrated because they are not met in the way you had hoped ... With no set idea of how something is supposed to be, it is hard to get stuck on things not happening in the time frame you desired. Instead, you are just being there, open to the possibilities of your life. — Lodro Rinzler

Well, we all like things to be predictable, don't we? We expect things to be safe and to keep on happening just the way they always have. We expect the sun to rise in the morning. We expect to get up, survive the day and finish up back in bed at the end of it, ready to start all over again the next day. But maybe that's just a trick we play on ourselves, our way of making life seem ordinary. Because the truth is, life is so extraordinary that for most of hte time we can't bring ourselves to look at it. It's too bright and it hurts our eyes. The fact of the matter is that nothing is ever certain. But most people never find that out until the ground suddenly disappears from beneath their feet. — Steve Voake

I think most of my approach to life has been like that, to find order in chaos, to be in the middle of a bunch of things happening at the same time, but find focus. I strive to be like the sun sitting in the middle of the solar system with all the planets spinning around it - millions of things going on. It's just sitting there being the sun, but exerting gravitational effect on everything. I think man should look at himself that way. — RZA

Look at what's happening with scientific things. They have discovered dark matter. They have discovered what is called the God Particle. All that is going to make religion obsolete. These are the things that are amazing, and it's an amazing time to be living in. It's a higher energy that we're going to be coming into. — Jimmy Cliff

To read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world. By reading narrative, we escape the anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something true about the world. This is the consoling function of narrative - the reason people tell stories, and have told stories from the beginning of time. — Umberto Eco

What did I tell you? Something's happening!' cried Sam. '"The war's going well," said Shagrat; but Gorbag he wasn't so sure. And he was right there too. Things are looking up, Mr. Frodo. haven't you got some hope now?'
'Well, no, not much, Sam,' Frodo sighed. 'That's away beyond the mountains. We're going east not west. And I'm so tired. And the Ring is so heavy, Sam. And I begin to see it in my mind all the time, like a great wheel of fire. — J.R.R. Tolkien

Having Simultanagnosia (object blindness), Prosopagnosia (face blindness) and Semantic Agnosia (meaning blindness) goes in my favour with regards to abstract art living in world full of fragmented pieces when I draw it is in real time no visual memory means no "pre-formatted" picture in my mind so I go where my hand takes it's like journey that is happening in the moment, hence why I drew these without my lenses on. When I was younger I would draw pictures by "route" which made it a appear that I had a visual memory (cobbling together things out of context and making a contextual image) — Paul Isaacs

I say, we live on, though I am wrong, this is what I say.
In the past, present, future, we live on as if in one time.
You can never stop the past from happening,
and it has happened , and will continue to happen.
This is the truth, I think I know, along with

the two other things I do know.
I exist.
I want to kiss you.

And also this: each day, as we go,
we will always be as young as we can be. — Derek Keck

There's no present left. This is the problem for a novelist. [The problem] is the present is gone. We're all living in the future constantly ... Back in the day Leo Tolstoy
what a sweetheart of a count and of a writer
in the 1860's he wanted to write about the Napoleonic Campaign, about 1812. If you write about 1812 in 1860, a horse is still a horse. A carriage is still a carriage. Obviously, there are been some technological advancements, et cetera, but you don't have to worry about explaining the next killer [iPhone] app or the next Facebook because right now things are happening so quickly. ("Gary Shteyngart: Finding 'Love' In A Dismal Future", NPR interview, August 2, 2010) — Gary Shteyngart

What was wrong with her? Why did things like this keep happening to her? Love wasn't supposed to hurt, yet it felt like all she knew when it came to love was pain. Every time she opened her heart, she just got burned. Or, in this case, frozen. And she was getting sick and tired of it. — Elizabeth Rudnick

Most changes in perception are gradual: we grow to hate or love an idea, a person, or a place over a period of time. I had certainly nursed a hatred of Nora Jansen over many years, placing much of the blame for my situation on her. This was not one of those instances. Sometimes, rarely, the way we see something is subject to alchemy. My emotions changed so rapidly, and I felt so strongly all the things I had in common with these two women, there was no way not to take immediate notice and stock of what was happening. Our troubled history was suddenly matched by our more immediate shared experience as prisoners on an exhausting journey. We huddled together — Piper Kerman

Entomologist Dr. Ovid Byron speaking to television journalist, Tina, who says, re. global warming, "Scientists of course are in disagreement about whether this is happening and whether humans have a role."
He replies:
"The Arctic is genuinely collapsing. Scientists used to call these things the canary in the mine. What they say now is, The canary is dead. We are at the top of Niagara Falls, Tina, in a canoe. There is an image for your viewers. We got here by drifting, but we cannot turn around for a lazy paddle back when you finally stop pissing around. We have arrived at the point of an audible roar. Does it strike you as a good time to debate the existence of the falls?" p.367 — Barbara Kingsolver

My mother was really involved with the Refusenik campaign with Soviet Union Jews. They would come and stay at our house, some of them, after they managed to get out of the Soviet Union at the time. There were things that were Jewish-related happening in my house quite consistently, but it was much more from a kind of activist standpoint. — Noreena Hertz

They would grow up grappling with ways of living with what happened. They would try to tell themselves that in terms of geological time it was an insignificant event. Just a blink of the Earth Woman's eye. That Worse Things had happened. That Worse Things kept happening. But they would find no comfort in the thought. — Arundhati Roy

The present: It is interesting that the "NOW" is called "the present." The present is the ultimate gift; it is the gift of truth and life. You are given the present every second, and you will receive it forever. The present is the only thing that exists, the only thing you are ever conscious of. Your life is a series of presents moving through time. The future does not exist until it becomes the present.

Life is one perpetual present.

Creation is happening now: Your body, mind, and the world around it are being created from microsecond to microsecond. Things may look the same, but they are not; everything is constantly changing and being recreated. Our life and our world is being created from moment to moment.

Life and everything in it is always new. — Michael Smith

I like to give dimension to shots inside action scenes. It's demanding because you have to rehearse a lot of things happening at the same time and frame all those things in a shot. But I feel like when you accomplish that then you've got a cool action scene. — Jose Padilha

The book had been the key: it showed him a secret world that existed alongside the daily, humdrum one, but that seemed invisible to most people. The birds weren't just things flapping about in the background; they had lives, just like people did: they got married, had families, fought each other and died, and so did the foxes and the squirrels and everything else. And it was happening all the time and all around him, not just in TV programmes, or in Africa or wherever. It was all going on, secretly and without anything to do with people; and TC longed, longed, to belong to it all. — Melissa Harrison

It is a world of magic and mystery, of deep darkness and flickering starlight. It is a world where terrible things happen and wonderful things too. It is a world where goodness is pitted against evil, love against hate, order against chaos, in a great struggle where often it is hard to be sure who belongs to which side because appearances are endlessly deceptive. Yet for all its confusion and wildness, it is a world where the battle goes ultimately to the good, who live happily ever after, and where in the long run everybody, good and evil alike, becomes known by his true name ... That is the fairy tale of the Gospel with, of course, one crucial difference from all other fairy tales, which is that the claim made for it is that it is true, that it not only happened once upon a time but has kept on happening ever since and is happening still. — Frederick Buechner

The right direction, if there were such a thing, is looking anywhere without using the mind as a filter. See things as they are.The present moment is right now, without any addition from the mind. If you can see the appearance, outside of thought, then you will also notice that there is no need for the person you have imagined as yourself. Progress, if there were such a thing, would be to spend more time in those moments of absolute presence/awareness and in the total immediacy of right now.This is not something that you practice, just notice that it is happening now, with or without the mind's participation. — John Greven

Each big idea like that is an operating system upgrade," she says, smiling. Comfortable territory. "Writers are responsible for some of it. They say Shakespeare invented the internal monologue."
Oh, I am very familiar with the internal monologue.
"But I think the writers had their turn," she says, "and now it's programmers who get to upgrade the human operating system."
I am definitely talking to a girl from Google. "So what's the next upgrade?"
"It's already happening," she says. "There are all these things you can do, and it's like you're in more than one place at one time, and it's totally normal. I mean, look around."
I swivel my head, and I see what she wants me to see: dozens of people sitting at tiny tables, all learning into phones showing them places that don't exist and yet are somehow more interesting ... — Robin Sloan

If your focus in life is on being productive, when things are not happening ... one has to ask oneself, 'Is this worth a grown man's time?' — Bob Corker

Nobody wants to admit to this, but bad things will keep on happening. Maybe that's beause it's all a chain, and a long time ago someone did the first bad thing, and that led someone else to do another bad thing, and so on.
You know, like that game where you whisper a sentence into someone's ear, and that person whispers it to someone else, and it all comes out wrong in the end.
But then again, maybe bad things happen because it's the only way we can keep remembering what good is supposed to look like. — Jodi Picoult

TRY: During the day, see if you can detect the bloom of the present moment in every moment, the ordinary ones, the "in-between" ones, even the hard ones. Work at allowing more things to unfold in your life without forcing them to happen and without rejecting the ones that don't fit your idea of what "should" be happening. See if you can sense the "spaces" through which you might move with no effort in the spirit of Chuang Tzu's cook. Notice how if you can make some time early in the day for being, with no agenda, it can change the quality of the rest of your day. By affirming first what is primary in your own being, see if you don't get a mindful jump on the whole day and wind up more capable of sensing, appreciating, and responding to the bloom of each moment. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

I was raised in a reform synagogue. I think we all bring with us a sense of when hard things happen to us, we find ourselves asking questions of why are these things happening to me at this time in my life. I think in that sense, there's a certain resonance that I carry. It's more of a spiritual resonance as opposed to particularly of Judaism. — Michael Stuhlbarg

Go to dinner with me?" His voice whispers against my ear. I start to shake my head when his fingertip lightly traces the birdcage tattoo on my arm. My eyes shut at the sensation. His touch. "I dream about you almost every night." Join the club, buddy, I want to tell him. I dream about me every night, too ... well, until I met him. Now I dream too damn much about him. "Just one date and I will leave you alone if you never want to see me again. Deal?" I open my eyes to gaze into his. There are too many things happening at once. Everything within me says to tell him no. Nothing good can come of this. I know what I have to tell him. "Dinner, not a date," I say, looking him square in the eyes. Holy hell! What did you just do, Keller? Really? Seriously? He grins, not hiding his happiness at my words. I step away, allowing him time to button his shirt up. "Dinner then dessert, and, Keller, it will definitely be a date," he says, — Nicole Reed

Oh God just look at me now ... one night opens words and utters pain ... I cannot begin to explain to you ... this ... I am not here. This is not happening. Oh wait, it is, isn't it?
I am a ghost. I am not here, not really. You see skin and cuts and frailty ... these are symptoms, you known, of a ghost. An unclear image with unclear thoughts whispering vague things ...
If I told you what was really in my head, you'd never let me leave this place. And I have no desire to spend time in hell while I'm still, in theory, alive. — Emily Andrews

I don't mind nothing happening in a book, but nothing happening in a phony way
characters saying things people never say, doing jobs that don't fit, the whole works
is simply asking too much of a reader. Something happening in a phony way must beat nothing happening in a phony way every time, right? I mean, you could prove that, mathematically, in an equation, and you can't often apply science to literature. — Nick Hornby

Some things you're not letting happen right now because the timing isn't perfect for you. Some you're not letting happen because you are very aware of where you are. But all things, as they are happening, are happening in perfect order. And if you will relax and begin saying, "Everything in its perfect time. Everything is unfolding. And I'm enjoying where I am now, in relationship to where I'm going. Content where I am, and eager for more," that is the perfect vibrational stance. — Esther Hicks

I was raised in a very humble environment, and I was always taught to be humble to the things that are happening in my life because they're blessings. They're blessings in every way. Whether you're able to help someone get through a tough time in their life through your music or through comedy, or whatever it is, you're just a channel. — Justin Timberlake

And I know, that I know, that I know, we are about to see the greatest manifestations of God's presence ever! A prophetess named Ruth Heflin sent me a word recently and told me to get ready, to see, physical manifestations of Christ on the platforms in our crusades, that people will have visions of the Lord in the meetings. Those things have happened in the past, I know. In a Thialagua (spelling?) meeting one time in Africa, the Lord appeared to a - to the whole crowd! It is about to begin happening, I know it too! Expect it, to happen also, in your own home! — Benny Hinn

Some people have a difficult time facing truth and reality. They prefer to live in a make-believe world, pretending that certain things aren't happening. — Joyce Meyer

But that can't work, can it?" Said Richard. "If we do that, then this won't have happened. Don't we generate all sorts of paradoxes?"
Reg stirred himself from thought. "No worse than many that exist already," he said. "If the universe came to an end every time there was some uncertainty about what had happened in it, it would never have got beyond the first picosecond. And many of course don't. It's like a human body, you see. A few cuts and bruises here and there don't hurt it. Not even major surgery if its done properly. Paradoxes are just the scar tissue. Time and space heal themselves up around them and people simply remember a version of events which makes as much sense as they require it to make. That isn't to say if you get involved in a paradox a few things won't strike you as being very odd, but if you've got through life without that already happening to you, then I don't know which universe you've been living in, but it isn't this one — Douglas Adams

Venues are all the same, all feel the same, these generic blank spaces. I like artists like Lightning Bolt-bands that go in and kind of change things every time, play on the floor, set up in the middle of the room. They go in and they reinvent the space every time, which I feel is like the kind of thing that should just be happening. — Will Oldham

He understood that she needed some time to get used to "them." He didn't. He knew exactly what was happening, and he didn't need another week, another month, another year, to get things in perspective.
He loved her. It was that plain. That simple. — Cindy Gerard

Brainstorming, for me, takes place in my bed at night between the time I turn out my lights and I finally fall asleep. It is not a very violent storm, but what's happening is I am just thinking about different ideas and maybe things I've seen that day that I think might make a good story. — Chris Van Allsburg

Certain things existed out of time. It was ten years ago, it was this morning. In that way the accident was like his mother's death. It did not recede so much as hover, waxing and waning at different intervals but always there. It happened in the past and it was always happening. It happened every single minute of the day. — Ann Patchett

Peter Hall was just organizing the Royal Shakespeare Company. It was going to be an ensemble, it was going to be in repertory, it was going to have a home in London as well as in the Midlands, and all of those things were happening at that time. — Trevor Nunn

Nothing can be sadder or more profound than to see a thousand things for the first and last time. To journey is to be born and die each minute ... All the elements of life are in constant flight from us, with darkness and clarity intermingled, the vision and the eclipse; we look and hasten, reaching out our hands to clutch; every happening is a bend in the road ... and suddenly we have grown old. We have a sense of shock and gathering darkness; ahead is a black doorway; the life that bore us is a flagging horse, and a veiled stranger is waiting in the shadows to unharness us. — Victor Hugo

She'd never really touched their faces before, but that didn't mean anything. She touched other parts of them all the time. Or at least, they touched things on her and she tried to pretend it wasn't happening in case she accidentally slipped and fell tongue first into their mouths. — Charlotte Stein

And you know, this thought crossed my mind at the time: maybe chance is a pretty common thing after all. Those kinds of coincidences are happening all around us, all the time, but most of them don't attract our attention and we just let them go by. It's like fireworks in the daytime. You might hear a faint sound, but even if you look up at the sky you can't see a thing. But if we're really hoping something may come true it may become visible, like a message rising to the surface. Then we're able to make it out clearly, decipher what it means. And seeing it before us we're surprised and wonder at how strange things like this can happen. Even though there's nothing strange about it. — Haruki Murakami

Is this really happening?" I hear him whisper.
"What?" I blink, try to stay awake.
"You feel so real," he says. "You sound so real. I want so badly for this to be real."
"This is real," I say. "And things are going to get so much better. I promise."
He takes a tight breath.
"The scariest part," he says, so quietly, "is that for the first time in my life, I actually believe that. — Tahereh Mafi

Gos was still out there in the forest, the dark forest to which all things lost must go. I'd wanted to slip across the borders of this world into that wood and bring back the hawk White lost. Some part of me that was very small and old had known this, some part of me that didn't work according to the everyday rules of the world but with the logic of myths and dreams. And that part of me had hoped, too, that somewhere in that other world was my father. His death had been so sudden. there had been no time to prepare for it, no sense in it happening at all. He could only be lost. He was out there, still, somewhere out there in that tangled wood with all the rest of the lost and dead. I know now what those dreams in spring had meant, the ones of a hawk slipping through a rent in the air into another world. I'd wanted to fly with the hawk to find my father; find him and bring him home. — Helen Macdonald

It seems we stood and talked like this before

We looked at each other in the same way then,

The clothes you're wearing are the clothes you wore

The smile you're smiling you smiled then

But I can't remember when.



Some things that happen for the first time

Seem to be happening again

And so it seems that we have met before

And laughed before

And loved before

But who knows where or when — Amy Harmon

It may seem like nothing is happening in my life now; in fact, I feel content with it for now; I don't know about tomorrow on how I will feel. I am just trying to take things one day at a time (not living for the present; but, my eyes is focused for the future and the future only. Because my past has nothing for me (it has already happen) and I will not focus on the present. Because I see nothing happening for me; even if I should make any effort of trying to get ahead — Temitope Owosela

I look back and think of all the times I've had to let things go in the past, and how traumatic it seemed while it was happening, but how my understanding of it changed as time passed - and oftentimes things that seem really difficult and traumatic in the short term seem a lot less difficult and traumatic in the long term. So I remind myself of that. — Moby

I was so scared it was all going to be gone by the time I got there. Ninth grade, tenth grade - can't this thing go any faster?
In the magazine, there were funny people with funny names like John Sex, who had wild white hair and a snake!-and didn't that just open up a kaleidoscope of new possibilities?
And how long the years are-endless! And the minutae of your daily life! So tedious, when there are BIG THINGS happening a thousand miles away. And when you go to bed at night, it's hard to believe those people, those fabulous, daunting people, are out there right now!
So we wait, and we endure, and someday we will be there, and we will make it. — James St. James

So she quit working to make sense of things - we don't realise it, but it's hard work we do almost every waking moment, building out thoughts and memories and actions around time, things that happened yesterday, and things that are happening right now, and what's coming tomorrow, layering all of that simultaneously and holding it in balance. — Helen Oyeyemi

At that moment a very good thing was happening to her. Four good things had happened to her, in fact, since she came to Misselthwaite Manor. She had felt as if she had understood a robin and that he had understood her; she had run in the wind until her blood had grown warm; she had been healthily hungry for the first time in her life; and she had found out what it was to be sorry for someone. — Frances Hodgson Burnett

Anyway, they have this discussion, and the kid is an idealist in a temporary way. He talks about his "restless generation" and things like that. And he says something like, "This is not a time for heroes because nobody will let that happen." The book takes place in the 1920's, which I thought was great because I supposed the same kind of conversation could happen in the Big Boy. It probably already did with our parents and grandparents. It was probably happening with us right now. — Stephen Chbosky

In America you had the forced removal of the native onto reservations coupled with slavery followed by segregation. Imagine all three of those things happening to the same group of people at the same time. That was apartheid. — Trevor Noah

The whole idea of WHAT HAPPENED WAS ... is not about dating. It is more about people who are not committed to who they are or are indifferent about their life in general, which is how I felt about myself when I wrote it. I had turned 40 and I was unhappy and I wanted to write about that. Dating just became the framework ... I like all those fringy, weird, nonverbal, quiet, tiny little things, those powerful interchanges between people, things that go unsaid, that people know are happening all the time but nobody wants to talk about. That's what I want to make movies about. — Tom Noonan

That's the thing: You can change things. You can repair mistakes. You can restart your whole life if you have to.
But some things you never get back. Certain people. Certain moments in time when you don't know better than to shield your heart.
You don't see those moments coming, you don't know it when they're happening, but later, as the plainness of life begins to show itself, you realize how important they were. You understand who really changed you, who made you what you are. — Blake Nelson

With time, the 'wheat bargain' became more and more burdensome. Children died in droves, and adults ate bread by the sweat of their brows. The average person in Jericho of 8500 BC lived a harder life than the average person in Jericho of 9500 BC or 13,000 BC. But nobody realised what was happening. Every generation continued to live like the previous generation, making only small improvements here and there in the way things were done. — Yuval Noah Harari

When you get to be my age," Maude said "most things were a long time ago. But in here?" She tapped her chest... "Some things happened yesterday."
"I nodded. I could feel how that was going to happen. It was already happening. — Laura Alden

Time has to be converted, then, from chronos, mere chronological time, to kairos, a New Testament Greek word that has to do with opportunity, with moments that seem ripe for their intended purpose. Then, even while life continues to seem harried, while it continues to have hard moments, we say, "Something good is happening amid all this." We get glimpses of how God might be working out his purposes in our days. Time becomes not just something to get through or manipulate or manage, but the arena of God's work with us. Whatever happens - good things or bad, pleasant or problematic - we look and ask, "What might God be doing here?" We see the events of the day as continuing occasions to change the heart. Time points to Another and begins to speak to us of God. We — Henri J.M. Nouwen

I've always been interested in animal behavior, and I keep reading about it because it's so surprising all the time - so many things are happening around us that we neglect to look at. Part of the passion I have for biology is based on this wonderment. — Isabella Rossellini

This was not the way to think things out for himself, and that was what he had to do. Take each piece of happening that, by itself, was just a meaningless hurt and find its place in the big picture. Do it over and over and over, because that way one came to understand things, and they hurt less. He had ... come to understand a lot and the knowledge he now held within himself was not made of sharp, separate hurts. It was just one big, heavy sadness. It made him stand very straight, braced against the weight in his heart proudly ... Each bit of knowledge he had gathered, each new hurt he had mastered, made him lift his chin a little higher, hold himself more closely knit and proud, because he had found out all by himself that his pride could be used as a shield to soften and deflect each new blow. His proud, strong body, his still, calm face, was the shield; he had no other weapon against the monsters in this dark tunnel of time that was so much like the shivery, scary part of a story. — Kate Seredy

Don't you think it's time you got out of your own way? Time you stop ending things before they start, time you stopped imagining the worst-case scenario, and giving in without a fight?"
"And if things turn out as bad as I imagine they might?"
"Then you chalk it up to shit happening and get on with your life. — Sara Bell

It's like I'll sit down and put my hands on the piano or the guitar, and then I'll hear a sound or I'll feel a chord that will resonate and then I'll get something happening in my voice. My voice is like a car that I get into and drive but I don't know where I'm going. And I record everything. And often, I sort of get into a state, a creative state that is, where I'm just feeling around melodically, and playing things off the top of my head. Then I go back and listen to it and for the first time, hear what I just did. It's like Elvis has left the building while the thing is happening. — Beth Nielsen Chapman

Black people loving and losing is something we don't see enough of. We're always in these heightened situations like something big is happening, something funny or something violent. And you know what? Sometimes we die of breast cancer or a broken heart. Things happen that are just not being explored cinematically. It's time we reinvigorated that type of film. — Ava DuVernay

If you get stuck in the memories of those times, you won't be able to appreciate all the fun that's happening right now. So don't think 'That time was fun', instead you should be thinking 'That time was also fun'. The really fun things can't be compared with one another. Ah, but here's a piece of advice: being able to find the fun that's happening right now, that is the best way to enjoy the present. Because of that you should be try your best to value the present, since it's going to change, sooner or later. — Kozue Amano

Life should be more about living in the moment than fearing what's happening outside it. It's about honoring what you want to do at any given time, regardless of what everyone else is doing. There's no use worrying about things that are out of your control. — Connor Franta

Stories don't teach us to be good; it isn't as simple as that. They show us what it feels like to be good, or to be bad. They show us people like ourselves doing right things and wrong things, acting bravely or acting meanly, being cruel or being kind, and they leave it up to our own powers of empathy and imagination to make the connection with our own lives. Sometimes we do, sometimes we don't. It isn't like putting a coin in a machine and getting a chocolate bar; we're not mechanical, we don't respond every time in the same way ...
The moral teaching comes gently, and quietly, and little by little, and weighs nothing at all. We hardly know it's happening. But in this silent and discreet way, with every book we read and love, with every story that makes its way into our heart, we gradually acquire models of behaviour and friends we admire and patterns of decency and kindness to follow.
Philip Pullman from his Award Lecture, Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award Recipient 2005 — Philip Pullman

When I write, I talk about stories and things that are happening in my life. I come from the church. There was a time in my life when I actually had that transformation and relationship with God. — Leon Bridges

Sometimes you go through things that seem huge at the time, like a mysterious glowing cloud devouring your entire community. While they're happening, they feel like the only thing that matters and you can hardly imagine that there's a world out there that might have anything else going on. And then the glow cloud moves on. And you move on. And the event is behind you. And you may find, as time passes, that you remember it less and less. Or absolutely not at all, in my case. — Cecil Baldwin

There is scarcely an occurrence in nature which, happening at a certain time, is not looked upon by some persons as a prognosticator either of good or evil. The latter are in the greatest number, so much more ingenious are we in tormenting ourselves than in discovering reasons for enjoyment in the things that surround us. — Charles Mackay

It occurred to Jeff that he had entered the vague phase of his life. He had a vague idea of things, a vague sense of what was happening in the world, a vague sense of having meant someone before. It was like being vaguely drunk all the time. — Geoff Dyer

Each of us have a winner within. Tap into your potential and gain unlimited success! The only one who can stop you is yourself. Think Positive! Be Optimistic! Don't be fooled into thinking it can't be done. Look around amazing things are accomplished everyday. New inventions, discoveries are happening all the time. If you can get one foot in the door, you can make it happen. — Amaka Imani Nkosazana

I seriously don't understand how men came to rule the world, she'd said to her sister, Bridget, this morning, after she'd told her about how John-Paul had lost his rental car keys in Chicago. It had driven Cecilia bananas seeing that text message from him. There was nothing she could do! This type of thing was always happening to John-Paul. Last time he went overseas he'd left his laptop in a cab. The man lost things constantly. Wallets, phones, keys, his wedding ring. His possessions just slid right off him. — Liane Moriarty

Probably my favorite thing about watching a movie that I'm in the first time is to see all the things I didn't know were happening in a scene around me. — Ed Helms

What we find is that our brains have colossal things happening in them all the time. — David Eagleman

I prefer drawing the things I've written to handing them off to another artist. Turns out I'm a huge control freak - and because I write in thumbnails, the art is already happening by the time I start writing! — Raina Telgemeier

It is like everything in layers. Things happen right at the front of the pictures and at the same time they continue happening, both separately and connectedly, behind, and behind that, and again behind that, like you can see, in perspective, for miles. Then there are the separate details, like that man with the duck. They're all also happening on their own terms. The picture makes you look at both
the close-up happenings and the bigger picture. Looking at the man with the duck is like seeing how everyday and how almost comic cruelty is. The cruelty happens in among everything else happening. It is an amazing way to show how ordinary cruelty really is. — Ali Smith

I think if you asked people "what's the biggest problem in your life?" They'd say, "I just don't have time for anything!" And at our fingertips, if it isn't e-mail, it's our Blackberry, and it's our iPods and telephones - we never stop. We never take those moments to stop the stimulus to find out "what's going on in there? What's really happening?" And then things start to build up. And then we are almost afraid to slow down. — Elizabeth Lesser

Culturally one of the most difficult things that happens is to get creative people to understand [that] the world is no longer just defined by television. The thing that happened, and has been happening for some time here, is that our work was much more diverse than even we knew it was. And I think as we began to change, the way we tackled problems and the way that we looked at problems was completely and utterly holistic in a way that I'd probably not ever really experienced before. — Rick Mathieson

We're repeating the same things all the time; there aren't many new things happening in this life. — Rokia Traore

Don't cry."
"How can I not?" I asked him. "You just said you loved me."
"Well, why else did you think all of this was happening?" He set the book aside to wrap his arms around me. "The Furies wouldn't be trying to kill you if I didn't love you."
"I didn't know," I said. Tears were trickling down my cheeks, but I did nothing to try to stop them. His shirt was absorving most of them. "You never said anything about it. Every time I saw you, you just acted so ... wild."
"How was I supposed to act?" he asked. "You kept doing things like throwing tea in my face. — Meg Cabot

There was a sense of all the things that go on on the street, particularly in New York, that you are just completely unaware of, that that conversation could be happening at any time. I loved the instability of the camera. It's just an unstable world. — Jennifer Beals

I don't think I had any idea at the time how to work with someone as masterful as he is. And I don't think at the time I really understood what was happening. I think I was in a space where I was like: there are all these things. I was shooting all these takes with David [Fincher], and I was just confused, as a person, and as an actor feeling a little too big for my britches and that this thing was happening and then also not having enough skill yet, and technique to know exactly where I was, and know about the character. — Jake Gyllenhaal

People who meditate deeply find wonderful things happening in their life all the time. — Frederick Lenz

As if I feared that the scope of what I could feel and imagine was being quietly limited by the world within a world, the internet. The things outside of the web were becoming further from me, and everything inside it seemed piercingly relevant. The blogs of strangers had to be read daily, and people nearby who had no web presence were becoming almost cartoonlike, as if they were missing a dimension.
It was just happening, like time, like geography. The web seemed so inherently endless that it didn't occur to me what wasn't there. My appetite for pictures and videos and news and music was so gigantic now that if something was shrinking, something immesurable, how would I notice?
... Most of life is offline, and I think it always will be; eating and aching and sleeping and loving happen in the body. But it's not impossible to imagine loosing my appetite for those things; they aren't always easy, and they take so much time. — Miranda July

I used to know how the mind handled language, and I could communicate what I knew. I used to be someone who knew a lot. No one asks for my opinion or advice anymore. I miss that. I used to be curious and independent and confident. I miss being sure of things. There's no peace in being unsure of everything all the time. I miss doing everything easily. I miss being a part of what's happening. I miss feeling wanted. I miss my life and my family. I loved my life and family. — Lisa Genova

It is in the quiet moments of reflection that we can gain a greater feeling of hope when we remember and recognize all the positive things that are happening during this time of great difficulty. — Laura Lane

Today we live in a world that judges its achievements by speed and busyness. ... We are so busy making things happen that we have little time left to think about the value of what is happening. We urgently need people who concentrate on the meaning of life rather than simply the speed. — Joan D. Chittister

Things change so quickly. Just when you get used to something, zap! It
changes. Just when you begin to understand someone, zap! They grow up. The
same is happening with Katie. She changes every day; her face just becomes so
much more grown-up every time I look at her. Sometimes I have to stop pretending
I'm interested in what she's saying in order to realize that I actually am
interested. We go shopping for clothes together and I take her advice, we eat
out for lunch and giggle over silly things. I just can't cast my mind back to the
time when my child stopped being a child and became a person. — Cecelia Ahern

Things just happen in the right way, at the right time. At least when you let them, when you work with circumstances instead of saying, 'This isn't supposed to be happening this way,' and trying harder to make it happen some other way. — Benjamin Hoff

It's been happening since I was in kindergarten. Not them all the time, but other kids, you know. Every day. It never stops, and it never goes away, thanks to the Internet
it just keeps happening every minute, every day. And I just want it to stop. I think about how to do it, you know. How to kill them. All kinds of elaborate things, like trapping them in pits and burying them alive, or covering them with concrete. — Rachel Caine

It seemed that there was no time to catch up with all the things that were happening. I would be at the construction workers' demonstration one day and then marching with the welfare mothers the next. We got down with everything - the rent strikes, the sit-ins, the takeover of the Harlem state office building, whatever it was. If we agreed with it, we would try to give active support in some way. The more active i became, the more i liked it. It was like medicine, making me well, making me whole ...
My energy just couldn't stop dancing. I was caught up in the music of the struggle and i wanted to dance. I was never bored and never lonely, and the brothers and sisters who became my friends were so beautiful to me. — Assata Shakur

I honestly believe there are good things happening in this world, and I'll spend most of my time trying to find them and bring them to light. — Jesse L. Martin

And I was looking for escape routes all the time. Ways to not fully be there, to be distracted by other lives, the lives of people I knew from high school and college that were happening in different states and cities. I would waste hours comparing my life to theirs, sitting the two of them side by side and circling the things that seemed out of place in my own life, like the "What's Wrong?" pictures in the back of the Highlights magazines. I don't exactly know what happened that night after — Hannah Brencher

There is (as I now find) no remorse for time long past, even for what may have mortified us or made us ashamed of ourselves when it was happening: there is a pleasant panoramic sense of what it all was and how it all had to be. Why, if we are not vain or snobbish, need we desire that it should have been different? The better things we missed may yet be enjoyed or attained by someone else somewhere: why isn't that just as good? And there is no regret, either, in the sense of wishing the past to return, or missing it: it is quite real enough as it is, there at its own date and place — George Santayana