Life & Wisdom Quote by Edward Gorey

Gorey takes a topic that usually arrives freighted with moral panic and flips it into a deadpan inventory of ordinary trouble. The joke is in the calm escalation: homosexuality is a "serious problem", yes, but so is heterosexuality, so is being a man, so is being a woman. By the time he lands on the shrugging "Lots of things are problems", the original premise has been deflated. What sounded like a concession to stigma becomes an indictment of the way we single out certain identities as uniquely burdensome.

The intent is less to minimize hardship than to normalize it. Gorey, whose work trades in polite gloom and absurd misfortune, understands that "serious" can be both true and misleading: true because living inside any social category comes with penalties and expectations; misleading when that seriousness is used as a cudgel to pathologize one group. His syntax performs a kind of moral leveling. If everything is a problem, then the scandal isn't desire; it's the culture that insists some problems are evidence of deviance while others are just "life."

Context matters: Gorey lived through decades when queerness was publicly treated as illness, crime, or tragic flaw. Rather than mount a manifesto, he opts for arch equivalence, the civilized voice of someone refusing the terms of the debate. It's a strategy of quiet resistance: if you won't stop calling people problems, he'll agree - and then widen the frame until the category collapses into the human condition.