"Strong I am one of those who never knows the direction of my journey until I have almost arrived"
About this Quote
The subtext is professional. Reporting, at its best, is a practice of arriving late to your own conclusions. You start with a hunch, a tip, a scene, then the story drags you somewhere you didn’t anticipate. Strong’s syntax mimics that process: the sentence keeps moving, refusing the comfort of an early destination, landing only at the end with "almost arrived". That near-arrival matters. She isn’t romanticizing perpetual drift; she’s describing a life where clarity comes at the last moment, after the work has already changed you.
Context sharpens it. Strong wasn’t a salon columnist; she moved through revolutions, labor struggles, and ideological battlefields where the "direction" of a journey could be redrawn by history overnight - and by the compromises a writer makes to stay close to power. The quote reads as both justification and warning: if you only learn your destination at the doorstep, you may discover you’ve been guided by events, but also by the narratives you chose to believe while you were in motion.
Quote Details
| Topic | Journey |
|---|---|
| Source | Later attribution: The Quotable Sagittarius (Mary Valby, 2012) modern compilationISBN: 9781936998203 · ID: -JBXDwAAQBAJ
Evidence:
... am one of those who never knows the direction of my journey until I have almost arrived. Journalist Anna Louise Strong, born 11/24/1885 I Change Worlds It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers. James Thurber ... |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Strong, Anna Louise. (2026, February 8). Strong I am one of those who never knows the direction of my journey until I have almost arrived. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/strong-i-am-one-of-those-who-never-knows-the-110822/
Chicago Style
Strong, Anna Louise. "Strong I am one of those who never knows the direction of my journey until I have almost arrived." FixQuotes. February 8, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/strong-i-am-one-of-those-who-never-knows-the-110822/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Strong I am one of those who never knows the direction of my journey until I have almost arrived." FixQuotes, 8 Feb. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/strong-i-am-one-of-those-who-never-knows-the-110822/. Accessed 11 Feb. 2026.






