Daily Inspiration Quote by James Agate

A little vaudeville self-elegy dressed up as a dare. Agate’s line performs laziness as theater: the sing-song rhythm ("now... never"; "for ever and ever") turns refusal into a refrain, as if he’s already anticipating the audience’s heckle and writing the comeback in advance. The joke isn’t merely that he plans to do nothing; it’s that he wants the credit for announcing it with panache. Even abdication, in the critic’s world, can be a kind of performance.

The first command, "Don’t pity me", is the tell. Pity is what you offer someone who has fallen out of the race; Agate rejects it to keep control of the narrative. He’s not asking for sympathy, he’s preempting it, mocking the moral economy that treats productivity as virtue and idleness as failure. The subtext reads: if I’m going to be judged, I’ll supply the verdict myself, sharpen it, and make you laugh so you can’t quite despise me.

Context matters: Agate wrote in a culture that fetishized work ethic while consuming criticism as nightly entertainment. Critics were paid to opine, not to build; they lived near the charge of parasitism. This line flips that accusation into a posture - not defensive, but insolently serene. It’s the dandy’s shrug with a hangover, the cultivated nonchalance of someone who knows his trade is largely talk and decides to make talk his final act of rebellion. The sting is that it’s both comic and a little bleak: "nothing" as punchline, "ever and ever" as a small, rhythmic abyss.