One would like to say in the aftermath of the 2008 election that everyone lived happily ever after. But the American drama, especially when it involves race, is always more complicated than that.
Frank RichRead
The cruel ambush of 9/11 supposedly 'changed everything,' slapping us back to reality. Yet we are constantly shocked, shocked by the foreseeable.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote reflects on how major events can drastically alter our perspective but also highlights our tendency to be surprised by predictable outcomes.
Frank Rich's quote points to the profound impact of the 9/11 attacks on society, suggesting that such a traumatic event forced people to confront harsh realities. Despite this awakening, he observes a continual human astonishment at events that, in hindsight, appear predictable or avoidable, hinting at a disconnect between awareness and understanding in human nature.
Themes
9/11RealityShockAwarenessPredictability
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about resilience after national tragedies.
More from Frank Rich
All quotes →I'm always struck by the kids who turn up in New York and LA, and places in between. Chicago. Wanting to do theater, wanting to do independent film. Wanting to break into television or radio.
Frank RichRead
There’s nothing entertaining about watching goons hurl venomous slurs at congressmen like the civil rights hero John Lewis and the openly gay Barney Frank. How curious that a mob fond of likening President Obama to Hitler knows so little about history that it doesn’t recognize its own small-scale mimicry of Kristallnacht.
Frank RichRead
Similar quotes
...mathematics is distinguished from all other sciences except only ethics, in standing in no need of ethics. Every other science, even logic, especially in its early stages, is in danger of evaporating into airy nothingness, degenerating, as the Germans say, into an arachnoid film, spun from the stuff that dreams are made of. There is no such danger for pure mathematics; for that is precisely what mathematics ought to be.
Charles Sanders PeirceRead
You live in a deranged age, more deranged that usual, because in spite of great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.
Walker PercyRead
People consider the harms they inflict to be justified and forgettable, and the harms they suffer to be unprovoked and grievous.
Steven PinkerRead
The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in a many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.
Cormac MccarthyRead
Excuse me, are you the imprint of a departed soul?
J. K. RowlingRead
Justice and mercy/ Are human dreams, they do not concern the birds nor the fish nor eternal God.
Robinson JeffersRead