Life & Wisdom Quote by Robert Fitzgerald

Gratitude is doing a lot of quiet work here, smoothing over whatever mess or miracle actually happened. Fitzgerald’s line is striking for how carefully it refuses to name the thing everyone is supposedly thankful for. “I think” front-loads modesty and plausible deniability: he’s not testifying, he’s gauging a shared mood. “Everyone who took part” turns a potentially complicated event into a temporary fellowship, a closed circle defined less by ideology than by participation. The phrase is almost bureaucratic, the kind of wording you use when you don’t want to reopen arguments about who was right, who suffered, who benefited.

The subtext is a familiar post-fact balm: if all parties are grateful, the outcome is implicitly justified. It’s a neat rhetorical shortcut, because gratitude reads as moral clarity without requiring specifics. The line also leans on “has always been,” a retroactive certainty that erases dissent and time’s capacity to sour experience. Memory becomes consensus; consensus becomes legitimacy.

Context matters because Fitzgerald, best known as a literary craftsman and translator, lived through decades when “taking part” could mean war work, cultural institution-building, or collaborative artistic projects that carried civic stakes. The sentence sounds like someone looking back on a collective undertaking with an editor’s instinct for understatement: no grand claims, no heroic self-mythology. Yet the understatement is its own power move. By keeping the object unnamed, Fitzgerald invites readers to project their own version of the event, and then to accept the comforting premise that participation itself was enough to warrant gratitude.