Daily Inspiration Quote by Russell Hoban

Hoban’s line skewers a familiar masculinity myth without quite letting women off the hook, and that balance is why it lands. “Sometimes I think” isn’t coy modesty; it’s a way of smuggling in a sharp generalization while keeping the voice human, fallible, observant. Then he frames gender difference not as essence but as appetite: men “need” a specific ritual, the compulsive audition for danger. The phrasing is almost comic-book visceral - “terrible lurking thing,” “hurl themselves upon it” - which quietly mocks the melodrama of self-made heroism. Men aren’t merely brave here; they’re dramaturges, manufacturing a monster so they can perform courage at it.

The women in Hoban’s sentence are written with a cooler, unsentimental intelligence. They “know where it lives,” suggesting an intimate, practical map of threat: social risk, domestic violence, the everyday costs men can afford to romanticize. The sting is in the second clause: “but they can let it alone.” That “can” implies both restraint and necessity. It reads less like innate serenity than learned triage - knowing which battles are winnable, which are performative, and which will simply swallow you.

Contextually, this feels like Hoban the novelist talking: less doctrine than character insight, the kind that comes from watching people orbit their private monsters. The subtext is existential as much as gendered: some people chase the dark to prove they exist; others survive by refusing to make the dark the center of the story.