War & Peace Quote by David Eddings

With a wry shrug, Eddings recalls the survival jobs that bracketed his career and the visceral relief of leaving them behind. The line glances back at periods when money was tight and he would return to grocery work to keep the lights on, even as he nurtured ambitions that had little to do with stocking shelves or balancing retail margins. The phrase fallen back on this periodically carries the rhythm of an artist who knows the irregular income of literary life and the necessity of pragmatic detours.

Pairing the grocery business with the army sharpens the point. Both institutions are structured, hierarchical, and rule-bound; they prize punctuality, obedience, and efficiency. For someone whose vocation thrived on world-building, character nuance, and slow-burn storytelling, those environments could feel constricting. Saying that quitting the grocery trade ranked right up there with discharge from military service is a dry joke about freedom regained, but also a confession about temperament: he was wired for imagination rather than regimentation.

There is also the modesty of the working writer in this memory. He does not romanticize struggle so much as acknowledge it. The fallback job is not demonized; it is a tool, a safety net, something he could do competently when necessary. Yet the happiness of leaving signals a clear sense of calling. When his novels finally provided steady livelihood, the cycle of returning to retail could end, just as the army had become a finished chapter.

The echo with his fiction is hard to miss. Many of his heroes start in humdrum or humble settings and are pulled into a broader destiny. Here the author undergoes his own quest arc, escaping the narrow aisles of daily necessity for the wider landscapes of fantasy. The humor softens the edge, but the core is serious: creative freedom is as tangible a liberation as any discharge papers, and just as hard-won.