"Everywhere is within walking distance if you have the time"
About this Quote
Steven Wright’s line works because it sounds like a motivational poster until you actually picture it. “Everywhere is within walking distance” is the kind of breezy promise we associate with self-help optimism or travel flexing. Then he snaps the logic shut with the deadpan qualifier: “if you have the time.” Suddenly the grand claim collapses into a literal truth so obvious it becomes ridiculous, and that’s the point. Wright’s comedy thrives on treating language like a math problem, following it to a conclusion that’s technically correct and socially useless.
The intent isn’t to inspire you to walk across continents; it’s to expose how easily we confuse possibility with practicality. Time is the hidden price tag on every dream, every plan, every “you can do anything” slogan. By making time the only condition, he reframes ambition as a scheduling issue, not a character issue. That’s both funny and faintly bleak: the universe isn’t blocking you, your calendar is.
The subtext is a gentle roast of modern impatience. We live inside shortcuts: deliveries, express lanes, life hacks, five-minute abs. Wright’s sentence drags us back to a pre-accelerated reality where distance is real and time is the one resource you can’t borrow without consequences. Context matters here: coming out of late-20th-century American stand-up, Wright’s minimalist surrealism reads like a defense mechanism against a culture addicted to big talk. The joke lands because it punctures a familiar kind of inspirational certainty with a single, devastating constraint.
The intent isn’t to inspire you to walk across continents; it’s to expose how easily we confuse possibility with practicality. Time is the hidden price tag on every dream, every plan, every “you can do anything” slogan. By making time the only condition, he reframes ambition as a scheduling issue, not a character issue. That’s both funny and faintly bleak: the universe isn’t blocking you, your calendar is.
The subtext is a gentle roast of modern impatience. We live inside shortcuts: deliveries, express lanes, life hacks, five-minute abs. Wright’s sentence drags us back to a pre-accelerated reality where distance is real and time is the one resource you can’t borrow without consequences. Context matters here: coming out of late-20th-century American stand-up, Wright’s minimalist surrealism reads like a defense mechanism against a culture addicted to big talk. The joke lands because it punctures a familiar kind of inspirational certainty with a single, devastating constraint.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
|---|---|
| Source | Steven Wright , aphorism “Everywhere is within walking distance if you have the time.” (commonly attributed; see Wikiquote entry) |
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