Life & Wisdom Quote by Roger Zelazny

Zelazny’s line treats mortal danger with the bored irritation of a guy stuck in traffic, and that’s exactly the point. “Pain in the ass” is aggressively unpoetic: a crude, domestic phrase shoved up against the operatic premise of assassination. The comedy lands because it refuses the genre’s preferred posture of noble dread. Instead of fear or heroism, we get inconvenience. That flippant register is a pressure valve, but also a quiet flex: the speaker is so habituated to violence that the emotional response has been replaced by scheduling frustration.

The specific intent is to puncture romantic ideas about being hunted. In thrillers and adventure fantasies, attempted murder often functions as glamour-by-proxy: proof you matter, proof you’re pivotal. Zelazny flips it. If being a target is “waiting around,” then the assassin isn’t a mythic force; they’re an appointment that keeps getting rescheduled. The subtext is psychological wear: hypervigilance doesn’t read as constant adrenaline, it reads as tedium, insomnia, and a life narrowed down to exits and blind spots.

Contextually, Zelazny’s work is full of hardboiled voices dropped into cosmic stakes (Amber’s immortal politics, gods with grudges, power that makes enemies inevitable). This sentence sounds like someone who has survived long enough to find the melodrama exhausting. It also smuggles in a critique of systems where violence is routine: the real insult isn’t the threat of death, it’s how thoroughly it hijacks your time.