“Nothing had happened because nothing had changed.
Yet the General was rubbish in the end.”
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Change
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Wallace Stevens 278
American poet 1879–1955Related quotes

Writing the president of the US Naval War College shortly after World War II. Quoted by Donald C. Winter, Secretary of the Navy http://www.navy.mil/navydata/people/secnav/winter/SECNAV_Remarks_NWC_Current_Strategy_Forum.pdf]

Early Autumn : A Story of a Lady (1926)

1900s, The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses (1900), National Duties
Context: The man who works, the man who does great deeds, in the end dies as surely as the veriest idler who cumbers the earth’s surface; but he leaves behind him the great fact that he has done his work well. So it is with nations. While the nation that has dared to be great, that has had the will and the power to change the destiny of the ages, in the end must die, yet no less surely the nation that has played the part of the weakling must also die; and whereas the nation that has done nothing leaves nothing behind it, the nation that has done a great work really continues, though in changed form, to live forevermore. The Roman has passed away exactly as all the nations of antiquity which did not expand when he expanded have passed away; but their very memory has vanished, while he himself is still a living force throughout the wide world in our entire civilization of today, and will so continue through countless generations, through untold ages.
“I know I had everything, but not because I had it. I know because afterwards I had nothing else.”
Que tuve todo lo sé, no por lo que tuve. Lo sé porque después no tuve más.
Voces (1943)

“Nothing lasts and yet nothing passes either, and nothing passes just because nothing lasts.”
Source: The Human Stain