Time & Perspective Quote by Diane Johnson

Freedom arrives disguised as inconvenience. Diane Johnson's line lands with the quiet sting of someone who has stepped out of an American religion and lived to tell about it. The first clause matters: "Not having to own a car" frames carlessness not as deprivation but as release from obligation, a shedding of an identity marker. In a culture that treats the driver's license as a rite of passage and the vehicle as mobile selfhood, she describes a demotion that feels like emancipation.

Calling the automobile "a waste of time" is sharper than the usual environmental or financial critique. It's not "expensive" or "polluting" (though it is); it's a thief of attention. The subtext is about how cars reorganize daily life into solitary, dead-eyed stretches: traffic, parking, maintenance, errands engineered around distance. Johnson, a novelist, is especially attuned to time as the raw material of a life - the stuff you either turn into experience, work, conversation, or you surrender to routines that don't give much back.

There's also an implicit class and geography argument tucked inside the personal epiphany. You can only "not have to" own a car if public transit exists, if your city is walkable, if your job isn't a commute trap. The quote reads as both confession and indictment: once you glimpse an alternative infrastructure, the car stops looking like freedom and starts looking like a system that sells autonomy while quietly billing you in hours.