"No problem is too big to run away from"
About this Quote
A motto for cowards, delivered with the deadpan sweetness of a man who built an empire out of anxious children and a dog with delusions of grandeur. Schulz’s line lands because it smuggles a bleak truth through the front door of a joke: avoidance works, at least briefly. It’s funny the way a sigh can be funny, because you recognize yourself in it before you can object.
The intent isn’t self-help; it’s anti-self-help. By framing flight as a can-do attitude ("No problem is too big..."), Schulz parodies American optimism, that cultural reflex to slap a motivational poster on panic. The subtext is that modern life produces a constant low-grade dread, and our most reliable coping mechanism is postponement dressed up as strategy. Run away long enough and the problem changes shape; sometimes it dissolves, sometimes it metastasizes. Either way, you bought time.
Context matters: Peanuts is basically an extended study of people trapped in their own heads. Charlie Brown’s defeats aren’t dramatic; they’re repetitive, quietly humiliating, and therefore familiar. Schulz understood that the punchline isn’t the problem itself, it’s the small, private rituals we invent to avoid feeling powerless. The line turns that ritual into a credo, forcing the reader to laugh and flinch at the same moment.
It works because it refuses moral grandeur. No redemption arc, no tough-love sermon. Just the sly admission that running away is often the first draft of how we survive.
The intent isn’t self-help; it’s anti-self-help. By framing flight as a can-do attitude ("No problem is too big..."), Schulz parodies American optimism, that cultural reflex to slap a motivational poster on panic. The subtext is that modern life produces a constant low-grade dread, and our most reliable coping mechanism is postponement dressed up as strategy. Run away long enough and the problem changes shape; sometimes it dissolves, sometimes it metastasizes. Either way, you bought time.
Context matters: Peanuts is basically an extended study of people trapped in their own heads. Charlie Brown’s defeats aren’t dramatic; they’re repetitive, quietly humiliating, and therefore familiar. Schulz understood that the punchline isn’t the problem itself, it’s the small, private rituals we invent to avoid feeling powerless. The line turns that ritual into a credo, forcing the reader to laugh and flinch at the same moment.
It works because it refuses moral grandeur. No redemption arc, no tough-love sermon. Just the sly admission that running away is often the first draft of how we survive.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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