"We are so utterly ordinary, so commonplace, while we profess to know a Power the Twentieth Century does not reckon with.... Oh that God would make us dangerous!"

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There is an inability to sustain the tragic mood, a phoenix quality of the mind. It may be helpful or harmful, it is just a part of the will to survive—yet, also, it has made it possible for us to engage in one weakening war after another. But it is a necessary part of our mechanism that we should be able to cry only for a time over even an ocean of spilt milk—the spectacular must soon become the commonplace if life is to be supportable.

— John Wyndham