Daily Inspiration Quote by Edward Albee

Albee’s line has the calm, almost folksy cadence of advice, then slips the knife in: “correctly” is doing a lot of judgmental work. The sentence proposes a geometry of the self where the straight line is rarely the honest one. In Albee’s world, the direct route is often just denial with good manners.

The “very long distance out of his way” reads like detour-as-necessity, not romantic wandering. It suggests that people don’t change because they’ve been persuaded; they change because they’ve been worn down by consequences, embarrassment, repetition, and the slow failure of their own stories. Only after the scenic route - mistakes, misrecognitions, performative roles, lies told to keep a room calm - can someone return “a short distance” and actually land where they should have been all along. That small final move matters because it isn’t small psychologically: it’s the moment a person stops bargaining with reality.

The phrasing also smuggles in Albee’s favorite subject: the violence of “correctness” in domestic and social life. Correctly to whom? A spouse, a parent, a culture with a script for what adulthood looks like? In plays like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, characters take enormous detours through cruelty and theatricality just to brush up against a painful truth they could never state plainly. The line functions as both permission and indictment: growth takes time, yes, but it also exposes how stubbornly we insist on taking the long way so we can pretend we had no choice.