Daily Inspiration Quote by Lizzie Andrew Borden

A tidy little alibi, delivered with the kind of blandness that dares you to call it a lie. "I have been away a great deal in the daytime, occasionally at night" reads like housekeeping, but its real work is tonal: it normalizes absence. The phrase "a great deal" is elastic enough to cover any inconvenient gap, while "occasionally at night" sprinkles in a controlled dose of deviance, as if conceding a minor irregularity will make the larger claim feel honest.

In Lizzie Borden's context, that blandness is the point. Her public persona was forged in the furnace of suspicion: a woman whose movements, habits, and demeanor were parsed like evidence. This line anticipates that scrutiny and tries to preempt it. It offers a narrative of routine independence without providing anything prosecutable - no locations, no witnesses, no timeline you can pin to a wall. It's the rhetorical equivalent of fog.

The subtext also leans on period expectations. A respectable woman "away" in the daytime could be running errands, visiting friends, performing propriety. Night is where the imagination (and accusation) goes feral, so she quarantines it with "occasionally", a word that shrinks risk and frames nocturnal movement as rare, almost incidental.

What makes the sentence culturally sticky is its accidental modernity: the PR instinct before PR existed. It's not confession or denial; it's image management under pressure, an early lesson in how celebrity turns ordinary logistics into an argument for innocence.