Life & Wisdom Quote by Edna St. Vincent Millay

A politely cocked eyebrow in sentence form, Millay's line turns the genteel ritual of letter-writing into a stage for self-portraiture: charming, defiant, and fully aware of the performance. "Please" and "good advice" set up the expected social script - the older friend dispensing wisdom, the younger recipient gratefully receiving it. Then she snaps the script in half with "I promise not to follow it", a vow that parodies sincerity while claiming agency. The joke lands because it treats advice as a kind of soft power: a way people try to manage one another under the guise of care.

Millay's subtext is not that guidance is useless, but that obedience is. She wants the intimacy and attention that advice represents without the implied surrender of autonomy. That small twist also suggests an artist's temperament: she knows she'll do what she wants, but she also wants the other person to keep talking, keep investing, keep trying. The "promise" is key - a word associated with moral seriousness - made absurd when attached to stubbornness. It's flirtation with irresponsibility, but also a refusal to let affection become control.

In context, it reads like a bright shard from the early 20th-century world Millay navigated: a woman writer negotiating expectations of propriety, gratitude, and "good sense" while cultivating a public persona built on independence. The line is funny because it's honest about an uncomfortable truth: people often ask for advice less to comply than to feel seen, to borrow a little certainty, then return to their own messy freedom.