Daily Inspiration Quote by Laurence Sterne

Sterne turns a writerly confession into a small act of comic sabotage. The line starts as a throwaway apology for digression ("neither here nor there"), then immediately refuses to behave: the speaker asks why he brought it up, and instead of offering a tidy reason, he punts agency to the pen itself. It is a joke about craft, but also a sly manifesto. In a culture that prized neoclassical order and moral clarity, Sterne makes a performance out of disorder, insisting that narrative is not a straight road but a mind in motion.

The syntax is the trick. The rhetorical question promises self-control, the kind of authorial mastery readers expect. The answer reverses it: "Ask my pen" personifies the instrument as the true governor, while the chiasmus-like snap of "it governs me, I govern not it" seals the gag with mock-finality. Sterne mimics the cadence of authority only to admit (or pretend to admit) helplessness. That pretense is strategic: by framing digression as compulsion, he licenses himself to wander, to interrupt, to flirt with the reader, and to turn the act of writing into the book's subject.

In context, this is very Tristram Shandy: a novel that treats plot as optional and attention as the real protagonist. The subtext is that authorship is less command than negotiation-with impulses, with language, with the reader's patience. Sterne isn't confessing incompetence; he's advertising a new kind of control, one that works by staged loss of it.