A Quote by Terry Pratchett
His mind worked fast, flying in emergency supplies of common sense, as human minds do, to construct a huge anchor in sanity and prove that what happened hadn't really happened and, if it had happened, hadn't happened much.
Related Quotes
Sure, I had dreams of being a star when I was 18. I could've pushed it, too, but it wouldn't have happened any sooner. I'm lucky. What's happened has happened in spite of me.
Not all that is presented to us as history has really happened; and what really happened did not actually happen the way it is presented to us; moreover, what really happened is only a small part of all that happened. Everything in history remains uncertain, the largest events as well as the smallest occurrence.
Until 'Bangalore Days' happened, a huge commercial success had not happened to me.
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.
Short stories do not say this happened and this happened and this happened. They are a microcosm and a magnification rather than a linear progression.
I find that the more I depend on real life, the less interesting the story is. It's much more common for me to take something that almost-happened, or I wish had happened, and then follow that possibility.
The Universe was a silly place at best...but the least likely explanation for it was the no-explanation of random chance, the conceit that abstract somethings 'just happened' to be atoms that 'just happened' to get together in ways which 'just happened' to look like consistent laws and some configurations 'just happened' to possess self-awareness and that two 'just happened' to be the Man from Mars and a bald-headed old coot with Jubal inside.
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.
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.
What happened to the good old days of "Woman as passive recipient?" What happened to being courted? What happened to sitting back under a parasol and granting someone a chance to try to win us over?
History is not merely what happened. It is what happened in the context of what might have happened.
So, you could often say things are terrible and that accounts for what happened, or things are really bright, and that accounts for what happened. Often, the real explanation for what happened is much more subtle and interesting and involves maybe small shocks or what a couple people did on a Wednesday morning that changed the arc of history.
Whatever adults don't understand, because they didn't grow up with it, is the thing they're going to be afraid of and try to legislate out of existence. It happened with videogames, it happened with television, it happened with pinball parlours and rock and roll.
We're just at the beginning of the beginning of all these kind of changes. There's a sense that all the big things have happened, but relatively speaking, nothing big has happened yet. In 20 years from now we'll look back and say, 'Well, nothing really happened in the last 20 years.'
What I don't like so much is to give explanations about people's behaviour... I'm not interested in making conclusions. I would never think about myself or anyone else, 'Well, this happened, this happened, this happened, so this must be the result.' It doesn't work like that with me.
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