Life & Wisdom Quote by Alice Foote MacDougall

MacDougall treats success like a capricious houseguest: charming, unpredictable, and never obligated to stay. The choice to gender success as "she" isn’t decorative; it’s a sly way of capturing how people mythologize achievement into a personality with moods, preferences, and sudden vanishing acts. That framing punctures the tidy American fable that hard work functions like a vending machine: insert effort, receive reward. Instead, MacDougall insists on the humiliating truth most creators learn late and grudgingly - that outcomes are only partly earned and partly granted.

The line works because it carries two tensions at once. First, it’s consoling: if success is "absurd" and "erratic", then failure isn’t always evidence of personal deficiency. Second, it’s destabilizing: even after you’ve made it, you’re not safe. "After she has come may depart again" is a quiet warning against building an identity, a lifestyle, or a moral superiority complex on top of applause. If success can leave "almost because of a whim", then the only sane response is to invest in the work itself, the craft, the community, the habits - things less likely to evaporate overnight.

Context matters: MacDougall was a writer and entrepreneur who navigated early 20th-century cultural gatekeeping and volatile markets. Her metaphor reads like hard-won realism from someone who saw acclaim and attention behave less like justice and more like weather - sometimes forecastable, often not, always beyond your control.