Time & Perspective Quote by Stevie Smith

Being alive becomes a kind of quiet credential here, and Stevie Smith wields it with her trademark mix of prickly charm and existential side-eye. The line starts like a plain fact - "I'm alive today" - then pivots into an argument about cultural permission. If history, taste, politics, or "the zeitgeist" claims to define who counts, Smith replies: no, the present belongs to anyone who’s stuck inhabiting it. That blunt therefore is doing the heavy lifting, turning mere survival into entitlement.

The subtext is defiance aimed at a world that files people away: too odd, too unfashionable, too inconvenient, too much. Smith wrote from the margins of official literary life, famously idiosyncratic, often treated as minor or eccentric even while she was razor-smart about the categories used to shrink artists (and, especially, women) into acceptable shapes. Her speaker refuses to audition for relevance. She flips the usual logic: instead of the individual conforming to the era, the era must stretch. It’s a comic proposition - "won't they" lands with a dry, almost teasing politeness - but it carries teeth. If the times can’t "make room", that’s not a personal failure; it’s an indictment of the times' cramped imagination.

"Enlarge themselves" is the key phrase: it imagines history as elastic, not monolithic. Smith is staking out a democratic present tense where difference isn’t a footnote but part of the main text, whether the gatekeepers approve or not.