Time & Perspective Quote by Rick Moody

There is something deliberately unglamorous about the way this sentence shuffles forward: "I made this list of stuff..". Not a manifesto, not a vow, not even a plan. Just "stuff", and just "time for me to try". Rick Moody’s intent lives in that modesty. It’s the voice of a narrator who wants credit for aspiring without having to pretend he’s already transformed. The line performs a kind of pre-emptive self-forgiveness: if it doesn’t happen, well, he only tried.

As a novelist of late-20th-century American jitter and self-consciousness, Moody knows how lists operate culturally. They’re a favored technology of control for people who feel their lives slipping into noise: productivity as prayer, bullet points as a way to domesticate dread. But he also punctures the fantasy. The list is not "things I will do"; it’s things it’s "time" to attempt, as if adulthood arrives as a series of overdue notices you keep meaning to answer.

The subtext is a quiet wrestle with agency. The speaker isn’t claiming mastery over his habits; he’s negotiating with them. That’s why the sentence is so effective: it captures the modern posture of earnestness undercut by irony, aspiration tempered by the suspicion that aspiration itself can be another form of procrastination. The humor is mild, almost sheepish, but the stakes are recognizable: a life measured not by grand turning points, but by the accumulation of postponed intentions.