Daily Inspiration Quote by Mary Wesley

Mary Wesley’s line is a wink masquerading as advice: it doesn’t promise reward, it promises aliveness. By opening with “Of course,” she sidesteps moralizing and adopts the tone of someone who’s seen the spreadsheets of consequence and is still choosing the messy option. The sentence does two things at once: it deflates the cliché that bravery guarantees triumph, then rebuilds risk as its own kind of payoff. Not success, not virtue - pleasure.

The subtext is quietly insurgent, especially coming from a woman who published her first adult novel late in life and wrote bluntly about sex, class, and wartime disillusionment. In that light, “does not always pay off” reads less like a warning than a dismissal of the transactional mindset that polices behavior: be good, be safe, be strategic, and you’ll be rewarded. Wesley undercuts that bargain. Risk is framed as recreation, not martyrdom. “A lot of fun” is deliberately plain, almost adolescent; it refuses the grand language of self-improvement and replaces it with appetite.

Context matters because Wesley’s fiction often treats propriety as a costume people wear to survive. This quip suggests she’s not interested in safety as a moral achievement. It’s an argument for agency disguised as a chuckle: you can lose, you can look foolish, you can be punished by the world’s accounting system - and still have chosen the richer experience. The line works because it trades reassurance for permission, with just enough shrug in the syntax to make it feel earned rather than preached.