Time & Perspective Quote by Mose Allison

There is a whole worldview packed into that plainspoken double-negative: motion as identity, not just a career choice. Mose Allison delivers it like a shrug with a razor in the sleeve. The line dodges the grand myth of the tortured genius and replaces it with something more durable: a working musician's credo. He is not promising a comeback, not pleading for relevance, not romanticizing struggle. He is simply staying in the game.

The intent is stubborn continuity. Allison spent decades slipping between jazz, blues, and sly, literate songwriting, always a half-step outside whatever the market was selling. "I haven't stopped" reads like a rebuttal to the industry's favorite narrative: that artists have peaks, then vanish into nostalgia circuits or polite retirement. The subtext is even sharper: if you think he ever stopped, you were not paying attention. It's a quiet flex aimed at gatekeepers and trend-chasers, delivered in the anti-hero tone that made Allison so influential to rock musicians who wanted sophistication without tuxedo formalism.

That "stoppin'" matters. The dropped g pulls the sentence toward vernacular blues speech, grounding the claim in feel rather than branding. It also signals a refusal to clean himself up for the quote page. In Allison's universe, momentum is not hustle culture; it's the slow, persistent churn of craft. The point isn't speed. It's staying interesting, staying wry, staying slightly out of reach - and doing it on his own time.