Wisdom Quote by Mary A. Ward

Ward frames a life decision with a novelist's shrug: you can research, outline, second-guess, but at the decisive moment you still have to jump with your gut. The dash-bracketed phrase "and trust" is the tell. She is not just admitting uncertainty; she is defending it, giving intuition a moral permission slip. After "more than half a century", experience is supposed to produce clarity, not instinct. Ward flips that expectation. Time doesn't eliminate guesswork, it only teaches you which kind of guesswork is survivable.

The craft comparison does sly work. In fiction, instinct isn't airy mysticism; it's disciplined feeling, built from long attention to people, motives, and consequences. By likening her choice to storytelling, Ward implies her decision is an act of composition: selecting an ending, arranging meaning, deciding what version of herself will be coherent. The subtext is a quiet rebellion against the era's demand (especially for a prominent Victorian woman) to justify decisions in public, rational, socially acceptable terms. Instinct becomes a rhetorical shield: you can't cross-examine a hunch the way you can audit a plan.

There's also a modesty that isn't entirely modest. To say you "follow" instinct in fiction is to claim the authority of an artist: someone trained to sense what rings true. Ward isn't confessing impulsiveness; she's arguing that the deepest choices operate like good narrative, guided less by proof than by an internal logic that only reveals itself once you commit to it.