Life & Wisdom Quote by V. S. Pritchett

Pritchett skewers a peculiarly modern reflex: the way we treat our own lives like they’re in the waiting room, while the “real” version is perpetually about to begin. Calling it a “habit” is the knife twist. Habits are unglamorous, automatic, self-renewing. He frames dissatisfaction not as a grand existential tragedy but as a practiced misperception, something learned and repeated until it feels like truth.

The line’s cleverness is in its sleight of hand with “here” and “elsewhere.” “Here” is not just a location; it’s presence, attention, the unmarketable now. “Elsewhere” is everything the imagination can inflate: the next city, the next job, the next relationship, the version of the self that will finally be coherent. Pritchett doesn’t deny that change can matter; he questions the mental arrangement that makes “elsewhere” feel inherently more authentic than what’s in front of us. That’s a critique of aspiration culture before it had hashtags.

Contextually, Pritchett was a writer of essays and stories attuned to ordinary lives, the textures of streets and conversations, the drama of small choices. His work often implies that character is revealed less by our big declarations than by our daily evasions. This sentence is built like one of his observations: lightly conversational, then quietly devastating. It flatters the reader with “curious,” but the real accusation is that we collude in our own absence. The habit isn’t life’s; it’s ours.