Daily Inspiration Quote by Dinah Maria Mulock

Mulock’s line flatters you with a small, bracing astonishment: the day isn’t stolen from us so much as it leaks. “Odd minutes” is a novelist’s phrase for the scraps of time polite society pretends don’t count - the interval before a carriage, the pause while water boils, the lull between duties. By insisting you can “catch” them, she turns time into a creature you can outwit. The verb matters: this isn’t the industrial clock’s discipline, it’s a domestic, improvisational skill, closer to netting butterflies than punching a timecard.

The intent is quietly corrective. Mulock wrote in a century that fetishized productivity while fencing many women into schedules made of other people’s needs. For a Victorian novelist - and a woman who knew the economics of writing - the line doubles as permission and strategy. You may not control the long hours; you can still claim the small ones. That’s both self-help and subversion: a way to make art, learning, or even rest out of moments a household would otherwise swallow.

Subtext: attention is a moral technology. “If one really sets about it” suggests that time isn’t found, it’s decided. The sentence nudges the reader from vague busyness into deliberate choice, without scolding. Its charm is that it makes discipline feel like discovery: the day, properly watched, contains hidden rooms.