Time & Perspective Quote by Edward Gorey

Gorey takes the oldest human fear - that the world could swallow us whole - and uses it to indict the far more modern affliction: suspense without payoff. The line is funny because it’s structurally cruel. He offers catastrophe (“the floor may open up”) with the crisp finality of a nursery rhyme, then yanks it away with the deadpan admission that it “almost never does.” The punchline isn’t relief; it’s disappointment. We don’t actually want disaster, but we do crave the charge of possibility. Gorey exposes that craving as a kind of aesthetic addiction: the problem with life isn’t simply that it’s risky, it’s that it mostly refuses to be interesting about it.

The subtext fits Gorey’s whole project - Victorian melodrama filtered through a 20th-century, postwar cool. His books are full of orphans, mishaps, unexplained deaths: a world where misfortune feels both arbitrary and meticulously drawn. Here he flips that world inside out. Reality, he implies, is not less threatening than his gothic tableaux; it’s just less committed to narrative. Danger exists, but it rarely arrives on cue, and the absence of “plot” is what produces boredom.

There’s also a sly dig at our appetite for meaning. If the floor never opens, we’re left with ordinary continuity, which offers no symbolic closure. Gorey’s wit isn’t nihilism so much as a dry-eyed realism: the terror is real, the monotony is real, and the joke is that we’re stuck wanting life to behave like literature.