Time & Perspective Quote by Vicky Krieps

Krieps lands the line like a quiet interruption in the middle of a sprint: not a manifesto, more an exhausted blink of clarity. As an actress whose job is literally to inhabit other people’s time - call sheets, takes, press cycles, the artificial “now” of a scene repeated until it’s right - she’s well-placed to notice how modern life turns urgency into a default mood. The phrasing matters. “Run after time” is a chase without a finish line; time isn’t a destination, it’s the medium. So the pursuit is doomed from the start, which is exactly the point.

The real sting is in the second clause: “no one knows what we’re running for”. That’s not just personal burnout; it’s a cultural critique of momentum as a substitute for meaning. Productivity becomes a moral identity, busyness becomes social proof, and the reward is often just the ability to keep running. Krieps isn’t romanticizing slowness so much as questioning the bargain: we trade attention, rest, and relationships for speed, then act surprised when the days feel thin.

There’s also a sly “we” doing work here. She doesn’t exempt herself or posture as a guru; the line implicates everyone caught in the same choreography - scrolling, scheduling, optimizing - while purpose stays oddly unnamed. It’s a soft sentence with a hard aftertaste: maybe the scariest part isn’t that time is short, but that our culture has trained us to spend it like we’re escaping something we can’t even define.