Parenting & Family Quote by Larry Dixon

Mortality sneaks in through the side door here, disguised as a shrug. Dixon opens with a line that carries the quiet shock of survival: "I never thought I'd live this long". It lands because it refuses drama. No backstory, no confession of why he doubted it, just the blunt fact of unexpected time. For a writer, that economy feels deliberate: the gap is the point, inviting you to hear everything he isn't spelling out - risk, illness, depression, a chaotic youth, an era that didn't promise longevity. The reader fills in the shadow.

Then he pivots to the joke: "It sounds funny because I still think of myself as a kid". The humor isn't decoration; it's a coping mechanism and a critique. We tell ourselves adulthood arrives like a certificate, but internally we're mostly the same nervous narrator with better paperwork. Dixon punctures the cultural myth that age equals transformation. The subtext is almost tenderly accusatory: if he still feels like a kid, maybe everyone does, and the grown-up confidence we perform is exactly that - performance.

The line also hints at how a writer experiences time. Writers live in drafts: revisiting scenes, rewriting identities, staying porous to memory. "Kid" becomes less an age than a stance - curiosity, impulsiveness, the sense that life is still in rehearsal. The poignancy is that he pairs that stance with the awareness of an ending he once expected sooner. Surprise at being alive meets surprise at not feeling "finished", and that tension is what makes the quote stick.