"A person will sometimes devote all his life to the development of one part of his body - the wishbone"
About this Quote
Frost slips the knife in with a smile: the “wishbone” turns the human body into a punchline, the organ of yearning treated like a muscle you can overtrain. It’s funny in that dry, New England way, but the joke is moral. A life spent “developing” the wishbone is a life optimized for wanting rather than doing, for rehearsing hope until it becomes a posture.
The line works because it’s bodily. Frost doesn’t attack ambition in the abstract; he imagines it as a warped physiology. You can picture the person hunched around their private mythology of “someday,” investing discipline, identity, even pride into a part that produces no movement. “Sometimes” is crucial, too: he leaves room for empathy. This isn’t a cartoon villain of laziness; it’s a recognizable drift, the way people can turn aspiration into a substitute for action and call it character.
Placed against Frost’s broader preoccupations - work, choice, the harsh dignity of making a living, the daily negotiations with limits - the quip lands as anti-romanticism disguised as whimsy. Frost is often misread as a cozy pastoralist; here he’s closer to a cultural critic, suspicious of consoling narratives. The subtext is American: a country that sells possibility as a lifestyle can also breed specialists in longing, people who confuse the capacity to dream with the courage to decide. Frost’s warning isn’t anti-hope; it’s anti-hope-as-hobby.
The line works because it’s bodily. Frost doesn’t attack ambition in the abstract; he imagines it as a warped physiology. You can picture the person hunched around their private mythology of “someday,” investing discipline, identity, even pride into a part that produces no movement. “Sometimes” is crucial, too: he leaves room for empathy. This isn’t a cartoon villain of laziness; it’s a recognizable drift, the way people can turn aspiration into a substitute for action and call it character.
Placed against Frost’s broader preoccupations - work, choice, the harsh dignity of making a living, the daily negotiations with limits - the quip lands as anti-romanticism disguised as whimsy. Frost is often misread as a cozy pastoralist; here he’s closer to a cultural critic, suspicious of consoling narratives. The subtext is American: a country that sells possibility as a lifestyle can also breed specialists in longing, people who confuse the capacity to dream with the courage to decide. Frost’s warning isn’t anti-hope; it’s anti-hope-as-hobby.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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