Life & Wisdom Quote by Muriel Strode

Strode’s line is frontier myth remixed as personal doctrine: don’t inherit the map, become the cartographer. The sentence works because it’s built on a clean moral contrast that doubles as a rhythmic engine. “Follow” is passive, social, and implicitly safe; “go” is active, solitary, and risky. Then she slips in the key provocation: “where there is no path.” That isn’t just adventure; it’s a refusal of permission. The speaker isn’t asking whether the terrain is allowed, legible, or already validated by someone else’s footsteps.

The subtext is especially pointed coming from a poet: art as route-making, not route-taking. Strode turns creativity into an ethic. “Leave a trail” is the quiet twist that keeps the quote from collapsing into lone-wolf romance. A trail is evidence and invitation. It implies responsibility to others who might come after, and it hints at legacy without saying the word. The goal isn’t merely to be different; it’s to make “different” usable.

Context matters too. Strode wrote in an era when women’s public ambitions were routinely treated as detours from the “proper” path. Read that way, the line becomes a soft rebellion: if the official routes are blocked, patronizing, or too narrow to fit you, you don’t negotiate for space - you build a new way through. It’s American individualism, yes, but with a communal aftertaste: the trail you leave can become someone else’s path, which is how change actually spreads.