Time & Perspective Quote by Jerzy Kosinski

Kosinski frames fiction less as entertainment than as a hand on the brake. The sentence moves like a warning siren: "alert", "indicate", "stop" - a tightening sequence that turns art into an instrument of interruption. He is not romanticizing contemplation; he is arguing that modern life, with its practiced velocity, trains us to skim our own existence. Fiction, in his telling, exists to sabotage that reflex.

The craft here is in the grammar of urgency. "Make certain" is almost bureaucratic, a command you could hear in a train station. He pairs it with "rush through", a phrase that implies not just haste but a kind of moral carelessness: you don't merely move fast, you bulldoze experience. The "moment" he points to is deliberately unspecified. It's not the grand epiphany; it's the ordinary, easily discarded instant where meaning might be hiding. That vagueness is strategic. If he named the moment, you'd file it under someone else's life. By keeping it open, he forces the reader to supply their own missed chances.

Context matters: Kosinski wrote in the long shadow of 20th-century catastrophe and displacement, where "missing the moment" can mean far more than failing to savor a sunset. Under that history, attention becomes an ethical act. Fiction's job is not to decorate reality but to re-sensitize you to it, to make you feel the cost of sleepwalking through a world that can turn brutal quickly - and to remind you that even now, the moment you "might still have" is not nostalgia but a last, practical opening.