Time & Perspective Quote by Quentin Crisp

Crisp turns cosmology into a social clock, then flicks it like a cigarette ash: history, he suggests, doesn’t always need moral enlightenment to move forward. It just needs room. In an “expanding universe,” the center can’t hold its old boundaries; what counted as the edge gets reclassified simply because the map keeps getting redrawn. The outcast doesn’t storm the gates. The city grows around them.

The intent is both consoling and barbed. Consoling, because it offers a strategy for survival that isn’t dependent on winning respectability auditions. Barbed, because it implies the majority’s newfound tolerance is often lazy, even accidental. The suburbs of “human contempt” are not a tragic exile in this framing; they’re a waiting room. Crisp’s wit is in the quiet humiliation of the so-called metropolis: it congratulates itself on progress, but the progress may be little more than demographic and cultural sprawl catching up to what it once despised.

Subtext: assimilation is overrated; visibility can be destiny. If you can endure being peripheral long enough, the culture will eventually have to route its roads through your neighborhood. That’s a distinctly Crisp posture - elegant defiance without piety, and optimism with a bite.

Context matters. Crisp, a famously flamboyant gay man who lived through criminalization, war-era conformity, and postwar moral panic, watched the mainstream slowly absorb what it had punished. The line captures that long arc without pretending it was gentle or guaranteed: time helps, but only if you’re still here when it arrives.