Life & Wisdom Quote by Neil Gaiman

Gaiman takes the oldest moral fable in the book and quietly flips its center of gravity: the Fall becomes less a catastrophe than a considered trade. By filtering Eden through "Adam's opinion", he dodges sermon and lands on something more human - a private cost-benefit analysis that feels almost tender in its stubbornness. Adam isn't a dupe; he's someone who looks at consequence and still chooses appetite, experience, desire. The line shrugs at purity as an aspiration and treats it as a kind of ignorance.

The genius is in the phrasing "worth the trouble". Trouble is smaller than damnation. It sounds like a scraped knee, a broken rule, a relationship you knew would complicate your life. Gaiman compresses sin into the everyday language of risk, which is exactly how temptation actually works. Nobody reaches for the forbidden because they're chasing abstract evil; they reach because the thing itself is luminous, immediate, delicious. The apple isn't a theological symbol here so much as a stand-in for all the choices that make a life textured: sex, knowledge, ambition, art.

In Gaiman's broader mythic sensibility, gods and monsters are less important than the stories people tell themselves to live with what they've done. Adam's retrospective endorsement smuggles in a modern ethic: regret is optional, and meaning often arrives wearing the mask of mistake. The subtext is provocative and oddly consoling - that innocence is overrated, and experience, even costly experience, is the point.