Daily Inspiration Quote by Christopher Fry

A sly little coup: Fry takes the supernatural, that grab-bag of ghosts, omens, and metaphysical loopholes, and drags it into the bright light of respectability. “Made an honest woman” is an old, gendered phrase for legitimizing what society has kept in the shadows - the seduced woman made “proper” through marriage, the scandal tidied into a story the neighborhood can accept. Apply it to the supernatural and you get instant comic friction: the uncanny is being domesticated, put in its place, granted papers and a respectable address.

That’s the intent: not to deny wonder, but to mock our need to launder it. Fry was a mid-century verse playwright with a taste for paradox and a Christian-inflected imagination; he liked the way language can turn theology into social comedy. The line works because it makes belief sound like bureaucracy. It implies that the supernatural isn’t inherently false; it’s inherently improper - too fertile, too unruly, too unchaperoned for the rational, postwar public sphere. Someone (a poet, a priest, a playwright, a lover) has come along and “legitimized” it, translating mystery into something you can admit at dinner without feeling provincial.

The subtext is a critique of respectability itself. If the only way the miraculous can be tolerated is by being rendered “honest,” then our culture’s default posture isn’t skepticism so much as moral policing. Fry’s wit doesn’t puncture the supernatural; it punctures the anxious social machinery that demands even the unknown behave.