“He wondered how we know that what happens to us isn't good.”

“It isn't what happens to us that causes us to suffer; it's what we say to ourselves about what happens.”

Pema Chödron (1936) American philosopher

“What is important is not what happens to us, but how we respond to what happens to us.”

Jean Paul Sartre (1905–1980) French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and …

“Joy is what happens to us when we allow ourselves to recognize how good things really are.”

Marianne Williamson (1952) American writer

“What happens when perfection isn't good enough?”

Scott Westerfeld book Pretties

“Disruption isn't about what happens to you, it's about how you respond to what happens to you.”

Jay Samit (1961) American businessman

“History isn't what happened, history is just what historians tell us.”

Julian Barnes (1946) English writer

“It was like wondering how evil had come into the world or what happens to a person after he dies: an interesting philosophical exercise, but also curiously pointless, since evil and death happened, regardless of the why and the how and what-it-meant.”

Joe Hill (1879–1915) Swedish-American labor activist, songwriter, and member of the Industrial Workers of the World

“In the end what matters is not how good we are but how good God is. Not how much we love Him but how much He loves us. And God loves us whoever we are, whatever we’ve done or failed to do, whatever we believe or can’t.”

Desmond Tutu (1931) South African churchman, politician, archbishop, Nobel Prize winner

“The importance of our connection, what it meant to find each other again, the way it made what happened to us and between us not be a waste, not be for nothing. He would know, he had to know, that not saying good-bye would be the worst end of all.”

Sara Zarr (1970) American children's writer