Time & Perspective Quote by Lynda Barry

Love, in Lynda Barry's telling, isn’t a moonlit accident; it’s a guided weapon with a lock-on. The line works because it yanks romance out of the soft-focus zone and drops it into the language of modern force: inevitability, surveillance, impact. “If it is your time” borrows the fatalism of a war story or a medical diagnosis, implying that falling in love can feel less like choosing and more like being chosen - by timing, by biology, by sheer narrative momentum. You don’t stroll into it; you get acquired.

Barry’s genius is the tonal collision. “Love” and “cruise missile” shouldn’t share a sentence, which is exactly why the metaphor lands. Cruise missiles are precise, impersonal, and indifferent to your plans; they arrive whether you’re ready or not. That’s the subtext: the most intimate human experience can also feel mechanical, external, even unfair. It punctures the self-help fantasy that you can optimize your way into the right relationship. Sometimes the “right time” is just the moment life decides to rearrange you.

As a cartoonist, Barry has spent decades translating messy interior life into blunt, visual punchlines. The joke carries a bruise. It acknowledges love’s thrill while admitting its collateral damage: the way it can flatten routines, friendships, identities. The sentence is funny because it’s true in the embarrassing way: we romanticize agency, then remember how quickly we’ve been knocked off course.