Time & Perspective Quote by Frances Farmer

The line lands like a private confession that refuses to stay private. Farmer isn’t performing atheism as a tidy conclusion; she’s describing it as an estrangement that feels both exhilarating and isolating. “God was gone” is blunt, almost childlike in its finality, but the next sentence complicates it: “We were younger.” That “we” hints at a generation, a peer group, maybe even a scene - people who felt modernity arriving in their bloodstream. The implication isn’t just disbelief; it’s speed. They “reached past him,” as if tradition were something you could outgrow the way you outgrow a hometown.

What makes the quote work is the mix of certainty and bewilderment. Farmer isn’t asking whether God exists; she’s asking why the social world keeps acting like He does. That’s the subtext: the real puzzle is not theology but consensus. Religion here reads less as faith than as a public script, one that others continue to recite even after she’s stopped believing the stage directions.

Context sharpens the ache. Farmer’s life was defined by institutions that claimed moral authority - Hollywood’s image machine, punitive psychiatry, a court system eager to “correct” a difficult woman. Her disillusionment with God echoes a larger disillusionment with any paternal structure that promises care and delivers control. The closing repetition, “It still puzzles me,” turns the quote from manifesto to haunting: not triumph, but the loneliness of seeing the set before the audience admits it’s scenery.