Daily Inspiration Quote by Jean Kerr

Jean Kerr’s line lands because it treats modern aspiration the way a cat treats a closed door: with amused suspicion. By pairing airplanes with diets, she yokes two supposedly “improving” technologies-one of mobility, one of self-control-and punctures both with the same pin. The joke isn’t that planes are scary or diets are hard; it’s that the culture insists these are unquestionably good, and Kerr refuses to perform that agreement.

The syntax does most of the work. “Wonderful things” sets up a polite compliment, the kind you offer at a party when someone tells you about their cleanse or their round-the-world itinerary. Then she pivots: “for other people to go on.” That last phrase is a perfect act of comic distancing. Airplanes become something you “go on” the way you “go on” a diet: an ordeal, a program, a self-imposed regime. Travel, usually sold as liberation, is recast as compliance.

Underneath, there’s a mid-century American subtext about status and bodily discipline. The jet age and the diet industry both promised transformation: faster lives, better selves. Kerr, writing from the vantage of a sharp domestic observer, recognizes the social pressure baked into those promises. Her refusal isn’t reactionary; it’s self-protective. She’s claiming the right to opt out of a collective obsession with optimization.

It’s also a sly defense of ordinary pleasures. In one compact sentence, Kerr elevates the underrated art of staying put-and of keeping your appetite, literal and metaphorical, intact.