Time & Perspective Quote by Gordon Parks

A small shiver of time runs through Parks's line: ambition poised at the starting gate, then the sudden awareness that the season is already turning against you. The deliberately awkward phrasing - "a little teeny", "just about ready to start" - reads like someone catching himself admitting vulnerability. Parks, who spent his life translating American power and American pain into images, isn’t performing stoic greatness here. He’s letting us hear the private math behind a public life: readiness is never clean, and the calendar never waits.

"Winter is entering" carries more than weather. In Parks's era, for a Black artist navigating segregation and the gatekeeping of magazines, museums, and institutions, winter can mean narrowed opportunities, harsher scrutiny, the sense of doors closing. The phrase is plainspoken, almost childlike, which makes it sting: the world’s coldness doesn’t need poetic embellishment.

Then there’s the sly compression in "Half past autumn has arrived". It’s a timekeeping metaphor that turns a season into a deadline. Autumn is typically the season of harvest, the moment you’re supposed to gather what you’ve sown; Parks implies he’s arriving late to his own harvest. That tension - between delayed beginnings and looming endings - echoes the rhythm of his work, which often frames people mid-struggle, mid-migration, mid-becoming. The intent isn’t self-pity. It’s urgency with a pulse: start anyway, even as the light goes.