Time & Perspective Quote by Dashiell Hammett

Hammett’s line lands with the flat, hard-boiled shrug of a man who’s seen too much to bother with prophecy. “I haven’t any sort of plans for the future” reads like modesty, but it’s really a philosophy of survival: planning is a luxury for people who believe the world keeps promises. The kicker is the soft-edged “I reckon,” a phrase that lowers the temperature of what could be despair. It’s not optimism; it’s an almost tactical refusal to dramatize uncertainty.

The subtext is classic Hammett: control is mostly theater. In his fiction, characters navigate systems that are rigged, opaque, or simply indifferent. So “things will work out” doesn’t mean “things will be good.” It means events will resolve, one way or another, because time moves forward and consequences arrive on schedule. “In some manner” is doing the real work: it’s a hedge that admits chaos while still insisting on motion.

Context matters. Hammett wrote out of a life that included detective work, illness, war, political persecution, and the Hollywood grind. That biography teaches a particular kind of realism: the future isn’t a blank canvas, it’s a corridor with bad lighting. The sentence performs a coping mechanism dressed as casual speech. By sounding ordinary, it refuses the melodrama that uncertainty usually demands, turning fatalism into something like professionalism: keep going, stay alert, don’t pretend you can script the ending.