Wit & Attitude Quote by Laurie Lee

Laurie Lee’s sentence walks a tightrope between bravado and self-indictment, and that’s exactly why it lands. “I expected to be shot at any moment” isn’t just a report of danger; it’s a psychological weather forecast, the kind a wartime traveler or volunteer learns to live under. The calmness of “expected” matters: fear has already been metabolized into routine. Then comes the pivot - “and if they had done I would have understood” - a startling act of empathy toward the very people who might kill him. Lee refuses the clean moral geometry of victim and villain. He grants his would-be executioners a cold, practical logic.

The real target, though, is himself. “Foolhardy” and “unpredictable” are not flattering adjectives; they’re a poet’s way of admitting that idealism can look indistinguishable from liability when the stakes are lethal. The line smuggles in a critique of romantic adventuring: in a civil conflict, the “wrong” kind of courage isn’t heroic, it’s destabilizing. Lee’s subtext is that war doesn’t have room for the charmingly impulsive outsider, even when that outsider believes he’s on the right side.

Contextually, Lee’s work is steeped in firsthand proximity to violence (and the memoirist’s pressure to turn chaos into narrative). This sentence resists that pressure. It doesn’t polish the experience into nobility; it keeps the moral grime on. The intent feels almost preventative: a warning to readers tempted to treat conflict as backdrop for self-discovery. In Lee’s telling, unpredictability is not a personality quirk. It’s a risk others may be forced to neutralize.