Life & Wisdom Quote by Diana Wynne Jones

A sly little mind-bender, this line smuggles a deep point about selfhood into an offhand, almost conversational shrug. Diana Wynne Jones isn’t building a grand philosophy; she’s doing what her best fiction does: using a sideways premise to unsettle what we assume is obvious. In “the wild” (a deliberately vague, half-anthropological setting), recognition is framed as a survival skill: you identify threats, allies, patterns. The joke is that the one creature you can’t encounter at the right distance is yourself. You’re always behind your own eyes, a constant presence without the clean external outline you grant everyone else.

The intent is comic, but the subtext is sharp: self-knowledge is structurally harder than knowing other people. We think of identity as something we possess, but Jones hints it’s something we infer, patched together from reflections, reactions, and stories told back to us. That’s why “if you think about it” lands like a trapdoor. It invites the reader to do the work, then reveals that doing the work doesn’t solve the problem; it exposes it.

Context matters, too. Jones wrote fantasy that treats perception as pliable and reality as negotiable, especially for young protagonists who are still learning what “I” even means. This line slots neatly into that worldview: the most alien character in your ecosystem is the one you insist is most familiar. It’s funny because it’s true, and uncomfortable because it stays true even after you’ve laughed.