Daily Inspiration Quote by Liz Smith

Aging gets sold to us as a slow surrender of desirability; Liz Smith flips that script by treating “harmless” as a superpower. The line lands because it admits, with a journalist’s bite, what polite society often refuses to name: flirting is rarely just “fun.” It’s a social transaction freighted with risk, leverage, and misunderstanding. When you’re young, flirtation can be read as a promise, a provocation, or a threat. When you’re older, Smith suggests, it can finally be read as what it sometimes always wanted to be: play.

The genius is the double edge of “harmless.” On one level, it’s liberating: you’re no longer auditioning for approval, no longer punished for wanting attention, no longer expected to translate charm into commitment. Your intentions get graded on a curve. On another level, it’s a little bleak, because the permission arrives only once you’ve been culturally downgraded. You’re “safe” because you’ve been filed away.

Smith’s context matters: as a society columnist who covered celebrity, power, and the theater of public life, she understood flirtation as performance and currency. Her joke isn’t anti-romance; it’s anti-pretension. It punctures the idea that aging is purely loss, while also indicting a culture that polices women’s appetites until time does the policing for it. The laugh comes with a sting: freedom, but at the price of being underestimated.