Time & Perspective Quote by Jessica Hagedorn

"Everything matters. Time is precious" reads like a stage direction disguised as a moral, and that’s fitting for Jessica Hagedorn: a playwright attuned to how meaning is made under pressure. Two blunt sentences, no metaphors, no cushioning. The effect is less inspirational poster than rehearsal-room urgency. In performance, the simplest lines can hit hardest because they leave no place to hide.

The intent is deceptively expansive. "Everything matters" refuses the luxury of dismissing details as background noise. It’s an aesthetic statement as much as an ethical one: in Hagedorn’s world, the minor character, the overheard joke, the political aside, the pop song leaking from a radio all carry charge. The subtext is that power often depends on what gets labeled insignificant. Declaring that everything matters is a way of rebalancing attention, especially toward lives and histories that mainstream narratives treat as disposable.

Then she snaps the abstraction into a finite resource: "Time is precious". Not time as a self-help commodity, but time as a lived constraint. For artists and marginalized communities alike, time is what institutions steal, what regimes waste, what audiences demand you compress into a legible arc. The pairing turns the line into a quiet critique: if everything matters, then the systems that force us to rush, triage, and forget are not neutral; they’re political.

The rhythm matters, too: two short beats, like a cue to move. It’s a reminder that attention is a choice, and choices are timed.