“Memory is the diary that chronicles things that never happened or couldn't possibly have happened.”

“Many of the good things would never have happened if the bad events hadn't happened first.”

Suze Orman (1951) American author, television personality, motivational speaker, businesswoman, investor

“It couldn't have happened anywhere but in little old New York.”

O. Henry book Whirligigs

“Remembrance restores possibility to the past, making what happened incomplete and completing what never was. Remembrance is neither what happened nor what did not happen but, rather, their potentialization, their becoming possible once again.”

Giorgio Agamben (1942) Italian philosopher

“Just as real events are forgotten, some that never were can be in our memories as if they happened.”

Gabriel García Márquez book Memories of My Melancholy Whores

“We can never possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time.”

Carl Sandburg (1878–1967) American writer and editor

“… I have noticed that when things happen in one's imaginings, they never happen in one's life, so I am curbing myself.”

Dodie Smith book I Capture the Castle

“… and her dreams that didn't happen, that couldn't have happened because she'd pinned them on somebody too broken and unattainable to love her back.”

Janette Rallison (1966) American writer

“There's things that happen in a person's life that are so scorched in the memory and burned into the heart that there's no forgetting them.”

John Boyne (1971) Irish novelist, author of children's and youth fiction

“And your own life while it's happening to you never has any atmosphere until it's a memory.”

Andy Warhol (1928–1987) American artist