Wit & Attitude Quote by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Millay’s line doesn’t just reject the upbeat fiction of “moving on”; it mocks it. The familiar complaint that life is “one damn thing after another” at least implies variety, a plot, maybe even progress. Millay swaps “after” for “over and over” and suddenly the problem isn’t bad luck but the grinding rerun: the same desire, the same mistake, the same disappointment wearing different clothes. It’s a joke with teeth, a compression of modern fatigue into a single pivot of prepositions.

The intent is quietly heretical. In a culture that treats adversity as character-building narrative, Millay suggests the opposite: repetition is the real tyrant. That “damn” does double duty, signaling both exasperation and an almost religious sense of being cursed into patterns you can’t outgrow. The wit comes from how conversational it sounds, like something tossed off at a party, while it’s actually a philosophy of time: less a line than a loop.

Context matters. Millay wrote in the early 20th century, when modern life was selling speed, novelty, and liberation. Her work often pushed against moral scripts, especially around love, autonomy, and the costs of freedom. Read against that backdrop, the quote feels like an anti-modernist punchline: the new century promises reinvention; Millay replies that the self is sticky, history is recursive, and even rebellion can become routine. The sting is that the joke lands because we recognize ourselves in the repetition.