"Darn the wheel of the world! Why must it continually turn over? Where is the reverse gear?"
About this Quote
The key move is the shift from cosmic metaphor to garage-language: “reverse gear.” That anachronistic, mechanical wish punctures any romantic idea that history naturally improves. If the world is a vehicle, then someone should be able to throw it into reverse, return to the moment before a mistake calcified into destiny. The subtext is exhaustion with inevitability: modern life accelerates, empires expand, markets churn, bodies age, and none of it asks permission. London, a novelist of labor, survival, and social struggle, repeatedly stages humans as organisms forced to adapt to conditions they didn’t choose. Here he’s not celebrating struggle; he’s resenting the rulebook.
It also hints at a political ache. A socialist who watched inequality harden during industrial capitalism’s rise, London had reason to doubt that “forward” meant “better.” The line’s bite comes from admitting a forbidden desire: not to win the race, but to stop the race from happening at all, to reclaim a lost fork in the road before the wheel rolls on.
Quote Details
| Topic | Change |
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| Source | Verified source: The Book of Jack London (Vol. II) (Jack London, 1921)
Evidence: “It is a long time,” he complained in the inscription to Beth above referred to, “since I’ve seen you to renew acquaintance with you. When you were here, the world was here, and the world was very much and too much with me. Darn the wheel of the world! Why must it continually turn over? Where is the reverse gear?” (Volume II, "The Last Summer" (inscription to "Beth")). This wording appears in Charmian London’s biography of Jack London, describing an inscription Jack London wrote in a gift-book to her cousin Beth ("Beth above referred to") during the period covered in Volume II, "The Last Summer." This is an early *print* appearance I could directly locate in a non-quotation-compilation context. However, it is not a stand-alone publication by Jack London (it’s quoted inside someone else’s book), and the inscription itself may predate 1921. I did not, from the accessible text, find a publication date for the original inscription or identify the exact book Jack London inscribed. Because of that, I cannot conclusively state the *first* time the line was published in print beyond this 1921 book, nor can I provide a reliable page number from a verified scanned edition. Other candidates (1) Book of Jack London by Charmian London - Delphi Classics ... (Charmian London, 2017) compilation95.0% ... Darn the wheel of the world ! Why must it continually turn over ? Where is the reverse gear ? ” Evening after eve... |
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Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
London, Jack. (2026, February 19). Darn the wheel of the world! Why must it continually turn over? Where is the reverse gear? FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/darn-the-wheel-of-the-world-why-must-it-160296/
Chicago Style
London, Jack. "Darn the wheel of the world! Why must it continually turn over? Where is the reverse gear?" FixQuotes. February 19, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/darn-the-wheel-of-the-world-why-must-it-160296/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Darn the wheel of the world! Why must it continually turn over? Where is the reverse gear?" FixQuotes, 19 Feb. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/darn-the-wheel-of-the-world-why-must-it-160296/. Accessed 21 Feb. 2026.
