We all felt that the men about us were making history, and that we were looking at heroes, if we could only find them out.
—M. E. W. Sherwood (1826–1903)
The light that was shadowed then
Was seen to be our lives,
Everything about us that love might wish to examine,
Then put away for a certain length of time, until
The whole is to be reviewed, and we turned
Toward each other, to each other.
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
The miracles of the church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always.
—Willa Cather (1873–1947)