Life & Wisdom Quote by Katharine Fullerton Gerould

Originality, Gerould suggests, is less a thunderbolt than a clever act of relocation: you take an idea that already exists, lift it from a corner most people never bothered to explore, and present it as new. The line has the cool sting of an insider correcting a romantic myth. It punctures the modern cult of the lone genius without needing to sermonize; the word "usually" does the heavy lifting, leaving a narrow escape hatch for the truly rare invention while insisting that most "innovation" is just amnesia with good branding.

The subtext is not merely cynical, but diagnostic. Gerould is pointing at the mechanics of cultural prestige: we reward novelty not as an absolute, but as a social perception. If your audience doesn't recognize the source, your borrowing reads as brilliance. If they do, it reads as theft. Originality becomes a function of unfamiliarity, which hints at power and gatekeeping: whose work is considered part of the common canon, and whose remains invisible enough to be strip-mined without consequence?

Context matters here. Writing in an era when American letters were professionalizing and high culture was still deeply entangled with European inheritance, Gerould is alert to how quickly "new" movements are assembled from old materials - and how often credit follows status rather than labor. Her phrasing makes plagiarism sound almost banal, even bureaucratic, which is the point: the most celebrated creative acts often resemble recycling, just done with better taste and a straighter face.