event quotes

There is no event so commonplace but that God is present in it, alwayshiddenly, alwaysleaving you roomto recognize him or not to recognize him† Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the heavenlyand hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.

- (Carl) Frederick Buechner
  Now and Then.

The outstanding event was the doing which I am still at. Don't pickle me awayas done.

- Emily Carr
c.1940  Quoted in Ira Dilworth's foreword to Klee Wyck (1951edn).

Je vois l'Afrique multiple et une verticale dans la tumultueuse pe  ripe  tie avec ses bourrelets, ses nodules, un peu a'   part, mais a'   porte  e du sie'  cle, comme un coeur de re  serve. I see several Africas and one vertical in the tumultuous event with its screens and nodules, a little separated, but within the century, like a heart in reserve.

- Aime   Fernand Ce  saire
  Ferrements,'Pour saluer le Tiers-Monde'.

How much the greatest event it is that ever happened in the worldand how much the best.

- CharlesJames Fox
  Onthefallof theBastille. Letter toRichardFitzpatrick,30  Jul.

If an earthquake were to engulf England tomorrow, the English would manage to meet and dine somewhere among the rubbish, just to celebrate the event.

- Douglas William Jerrold
Quoted in Blanchard Jerrold  The Life and Remains of Douglas Jerrold (1859), ch.14.

Usually it is the stereotyped shape assumed by an event at an obvious place that uncovers the run of the news.

-Walter Lippmann
  Public Opinion, ch.23.

The function of news is to signalize an event, the functionoftruth istobring to lightthehiddenfacts, toset them into relationwith each other, and make a picture of reality on which men can act.Only at those points, where social conditions take recognizable and measurable shape, do the body of truth and the body of news coincide.

-Walter Lippmann
  Public Opinion, ch.23.

The horrorof theTwentieth Century was the size of each event, and the paucity of its reverberation. 540

- Norman Kingsley Mailer
  Of  A Fire On The Moon, pt.1, ch.2.

Yet where an equal poise of hope and fear Does arbitrate the event, my nature is That I incline to hope, rather than fear, And gladly banish squint suspicion.

-John Milton
  Comus,  A Mask, l.410^13.

At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to actrather than as a space in which to reproduce, re-design, analyze or 'express'an object, actual or imagined.What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.

- Harold Rosenberg
  'TheAmerican Action Painters', in Art News, no.51, Dec.

For me, as for most novelists, every genuine imaginative event begins down there, with the facts, with the specific, and not with the philosophical, theideological, or the abstract.

- Philip Milton Roth
  The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography,'Dear Zuckerman'.

What would happen if†men could menstruate and women could not? Clearly, menstruationwould become an enviable, boast-worthy, masculine event: Men would brag about how long and how much.Young boys would talk about it as the envied beginning of manhood† Generals, right-wing politicians, and religious fundamentalists would cite †'mens-truation'as proof that only men could serve God and country in combat† If men could menstruate, the power justifications would go on and on. If we let them.

- Gloria Steinem
  'If Men could Menstruate', collected in Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions (1983).

The importance of an historical event lies not in what happened but in what later generations believe to have happened.

- (Edward) Gough Whitlam
  Speech at Ballarat,Victoria, 3 Dec.