“I could have. What does this phrase mean? At any given moment in our lives, there are certain things that could have heppened but, didn't. The magic moments go unrecognized, and then suddenly, the hand of destiny changes everything.”
Variant: At any given moment in our lives, there are certain things that could have happened but didn't. The magic moments
go unrecognized, and then suddenly, the hand of destiny changes everything.
Source: By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept
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Paulo Coelho 844
Brazilian lyricist and novelist 1947Related quotes

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/uncle-boonmee-who-can-recall-his-past-lives-2011 of Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (14 April 2011)
Reviews, Three-and-a-half star reviews

“We live at what could be a defining moment for the cosmos, not just for our Earth.”
Our Final Hour: A Scientist's Warning (2003) <!-- | date = 2003-03-18
Context: Once the threshold is crossed when there is a self-sustaining level of life in space, then life's long-range future will be secure irrespective of any of the risks on Earth (with the single exception of the catastrophic destruction of space itself). Will this happen before our technical civilisation disintegrates, leaving this as a might-have-been? Will the self-sustaining space communities be established before a catastrophe sets back the prospect of any such enterprise, perhaps foreclosing it for ever? We live at what could be a defining moment for the cosmos, not just for our Earth.

Micah Sparks, Chapter 17, p. 339
2000s, Three Weeks with My Brother (2004)
“Time was such an odd thing. One moment you could talk to someone, then suddenly, they were gone.”
Source: Raven's Strike

“I could have been anyone.
You could have been anyone's dream.
Why did you have to choose our moment?”
Song lyrics, The Kick Inside (1978)
Context: I could have been anyone.
You could have been anyone's dream.
Why did you have to choose our moment?
Why did you have to make me feel that?
Why did you make it so unreal?

Sir Arthur Salter, Personality in Politics (London, 1947), p. 198.
About

Narrator, Prologue, p. 1
2000s, A Bend in the Road (2001)

June 27, 1992 Las Vegas, Nevada interview with Lederman.
From Subatomic World Explorer, as noted on American Academy of Achievement web site http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/led0pro-1 (URL accessed on October 20, 2008)