Quotes About Events

Most of the adventures recorded in this book really occurred;

We know little about history beyond its public displays, and even then what we know is reconstructed.

it wasn't necessarily events themselves that drove our emotions but our beliefs about or interpretations of those events.

And so now, in the shadow of unspoken events, I watch Zampanò's courtyard darken. Everything whimsical has left. I try to study the light-going carefully. From my room. In the glass of memory. In the moonstream of my imagination. The weeds, the windows, every bench. But the old man is not there, and the cats are all gone. Something else has taken their place. Something I am unable to see. Waiting. I'm afraid. It is hungry. It is immortal. Worse, it knows nothing of whim.

Of course, I'm being rude. I'm spoiling the ending, not only of the entire book, but of this particular piece of it. I have given you two events in advance, because I don't have much interest in building mystery. Mystery bores me. It chores me. I know what happens and so do you. It's the machinations that wheel us there that aggravate, perplex, interest, and astound me. There are many things to think of. There is much story.

I satirize at all times, and my hyperboles are as nothing compared to the events to which they refer.

This remains the great deficiency of literature: its imitation of nature cannot prepare you for the main events. For the main events, only experience will answer.

Unlike the poet, the novelist (see Auden's lustrous sonnet of that name) assumes that his or her reactions to the main events (in life, in history) are utterly median, average—predictably and dependably human.

There are those who write history. There are those who make history. There are those who experience history.

resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. v3.0

Life is full of whimsical happenings, Watson

If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generations, and leading to the most outré results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable.

The inexpressible depth of music, so easy to understand and yet so inexplicable, is due to the fact that it reproduces all the emotions of our innermost being, but entirely without reality and remote from its pain… Music expresses only the quintessence of life and its events, never these themselves.

Exaggeration of every kind is as essential to journalism as it is to the dramatic art; for the object of journalism is to make events go as far as possible. Thus it is that all journalists are, in the very nature of their calling, alarmists; and this is their way of giving interest to what they write. Herein

Exaggeration of every kind is as essential to journalism as it is to the dramatic art; for the object of journalism is to make events go as far as possible. Thus it is that all journalists are, in the very nature of their calling, alarmists; and this is their way of giving interest to what they write. Herein they are like little dogs; if anything stirs, they immediately set up a shrill bark.

In psychology, there's something called the broken-leg problem. A statistical formula may be highly successful in predicting whether or not a person will go to a movie in the next week. But someone who knows that this person is laid up with a broken leg will beat the formula. No formula can take into account the infinite range of such exceptional events.

But past events had impressed uponme how fast things could go wrong, and how different life might be after they did.

But even amid such stirring events, those two scourges of Burmese politics, factionalism and jealousy, began to cast their shadow.

I write - and read - for the sake of the story... My basic test for any story is: 'Would I want to meet these characters and observe these events in real life? Is this story an experience worth living through for its own sake? Is the pleasure of contemplating these characters an end itself?

You Cannot Always Control External Events, But You Can Control Your Personal Peaks And Valleys By What You Believe And What You Do.

We cannot control events, Samuel Adams liked to say. The trick, he revealed that summer, "is to foresee as far as we are able, prepare for, and improve them.

Octavian died at age seventy-six, at home in his bed, one of the few Roman emperors not murdered by close kin, another Hellenistic legacy. Having ruled for forty-four years—twice as long as Cleopatra—he had plenty of time in which to refashion the events that had brought him to power.

The thought of such a turn of events brought the flame of vengeance to the monarch's eyes, and his iron fingers clutched the air, as if already closing around the throats of his beloved subjects.

The practice of mindfulness aims for a still and lucid engagement with the open field of contingent events in which one's life is embedded. All events are ontologically equivalent: mind is not more "real" than matter, nor matter more "real" than mind.