"I thought I was going nowhere. Now I can see there was a pattern"
About this Quote
DiCamillo’s line has the calm snap of hindsight: the moment when life stops looking like a string of wrong turns and starts reading like a story with structure. “I thought I was going nowhere” isn’t just self-doubt; it’s the particular despair of living inside the middle of a narrative, when nothing has resolved and every choice feels provisional. Then the second sentence quietly rewrites the first. “Now I can see” signals that the change isn’t in the events themselves but in the vantage point. The world didn’t suddenly become coherent; the speaker acquired the distance to notice the shape.
The key word is “pattern,” not “plan.” A plan implies an authorial hand, a neat moral, fate with good PR. A pattern is humbler and more humane: repetition, echoes, accidental symmetry. It leaves room for randomness and still grants meaning. That’s a very DiCamillo move, especially for a writer whose books often take children’s feelings seriously without pretending childhood is orderly. In her fiction, grief, loneliness, and odd little acts of kindness don’t line up like lessons; they accumulate until you recognize what they’ve been building.
Subtextually, the quote is a defense of narrative itself. Stories aren’t just entertainment; they’re a technology for survival, a way to metabolize confusion into something you can carry. It also resists hustle-culture teleology. “Going nowhere” is what life feels like when you measure it only by external progress. “Pattern” suggests another metric: the internal throughline you only discover after you’ve lived it.
The key word is “pattern,” not “plan.” A plan implies an authorial hand, a neat moral, fate with good PR. A pattern is humbler and more humane: repetition, echoes, accidental symmetry. It leaves room for randomness and still grants meaning. That’s a very DiCamillo move, especially for a writer whose books often take children’s feelings seriously without pretending childhood is orderly. In her fiction, grief, loneliness, and odd little acts of kindness don’t line up like lessons; they accumulate until you recognize what they’ve been building.
Subtextually, the quote is a defense of narrative itself. Stories aren’t just entertainment; they’re a technology for survival, a way to metabolize confusion into something you can carry. It also resists hustle-culture teleology. “Going nowhere” is what life feels like when you measure it only by external progress. “Pattern” suggests another metric: the internal throughline you only discover after you’ve lived it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Meaning of Life |
|---|
More Quotes by Kate
Add to List
