Life & Wisdom Quote by Oliver Herford

A manuscript, in Herford's hands, becomes less a sacred vessel of art than a hot potato passed between two mismatched clocks. "Submitted in haste and returned at leisure" is a neat little cruelty: it compresses the emotional asymmetry of literary ambition into a single, clock-faced joke. The writer is urgent because the stakes feel existential; the gatekeeper is unhurried because the stakes are procedural. Herford doesn’t need to mention rejection slips or editorial silence. The timing does the humiliating work.

The line’s bite comes from its bureaucratic inversion of romance. We’re trained to imagine the manuscript as the product of long toil and careful craft. Herford flips that mythology, suggesting that whatever devotion went into it, the industry will treat it like just another item in a stack. "Haste" isn’t only a jab at overeager authors; it hints at the economic pressure to produce, submit, hustle. "Leisure" isn’t merely editorial laziness; it’s institutional power, the privilege of delay. Waiting becomes a tool, a quiet way to remind the writer who gets to decide what matters.

Context matters: Herford worked in a print world of magazines, publishers, and postal submissions, when response times could stretch for months and the silence itself was a kind of verdict. Read now, it lands with eerie familiarity. Swap the manuscript for a screenplay, a pitch deck, a job application, even an email thread with a powerful person. The medium changes; the tempo of inequality doesn’t.