Life & Wisdom Quote by Katharine Anthony

There is a cool, surgical sting to Anthony's line: it skewers the modern myth that the self is only real once it is self-sufficient. The phrasing "People seem to think" plays innocent while loading the indictment. She is not arguing with a single person; she is diagnosing a cultural habit, one so pervasive it passes as common sense. And "began" is the masterstroke. It frames personal independence not as a milestone but as a creation story, a secular Genesis where dependency is treated as pre-life, pre-meaning, pre-identity.

Anthony wrote in a period when "independence" was being sold as both moral achievement and social permission slip, especially in debates around women's autonomy, work, and marriage. The subtext carries an implicit feminist critique: if the culture only credits life once you are "independent", then anyone structurally denied independence is cast as unfinished. That includes women constrained by law and custom, but also children, the elderly, the ill, and anyone whose survival is collective rather than individual.

What makes the line work is its refusal to romanticize dependence while refusing to demonize it. Anthony is puncturing the smugness of self-made narratives, hinting at how they erase the unglamorous scaffolding beneath every "independent" life: care work, inheritance, community, luck, social stability. It's a warning about a society that confuses autonomy with legitimacy, then uses that confusion to justify indifference.