"If I don't make it today, I'll come in tomorrow"
About this Quote
The line lands like a shrug that doubles as a manifesto: no dramatics, no apology, just a calm insistence on continuity. Coming from Ruth Gordon, it reads less like workplace small talk and more like a performer’s survival tactic. Show business runs on cancellations, bad reviews, bad nerves, bad luck. This sentence refuses to grant any of that the dignity of a crisis. If today doesn’t happen, tomorrow will. The “I” is steady, the “make it” is wonderfully elastic: make it to work, make it in life, make it through the day, make it at all.
The subtext is grit without the self-congratulation. Gordon doesn’t frame persistence as heroic suffering; she frames it as scheduling. That’s the sly power here. By reducing failure to a minor logistics problem, she robs it of its sting. It’s a comic deflation that feels actorly: timing, understatement, the tiny pivot that gets the laugh and keeps the scene moving.
Context matters, too. Gordon’s career bloomed across an era that routinely sidelined women as they aged, yet she became a late-life icon, often playing eccentric, sharp-edged characters who refused invisibility. “I’ll come in tomorrow” carries that same refusal. It’s not optimism; it’s presence. Even when you don’t “make it,” you don’t disappear. You return, you re-enter the frame, you insist on another take.
The subtext is grit without the self-congratulation. Gordon doesn’t frame persistence as heroic suffering; she frames it as scheduling. That’s the sly power here. By reducing failure to a minor logistics problem, she robs it of its sting. It’s a comic deflation that feels actorly: timing, understatement, the tiny pivot that gets the laugh and keeps the scene moving.
Context matters, too. Gordon’s career bloomed across an era that routinely sidelined women as they aged, yet she became a late-life icon, often playing eccentric, sharp-edged characters who refused invisibility. “I’ll come in tomorrow” carries that same refusal. It’s not optimism; it’s presence. Even when you don’t “make it,” you don’t disappear. You return, you re-enter the frame, you insist on another take.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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