"The first time it felt really dangerous, like the sort of thing you had to lock the doors and close the curtains on because if anybody saw you, God would strike you down with a thunderbolt. But I took to it like a duck to water"
About this Quote
Danger arrives here wearing the costume of pleasure. Jamie Muir frames the “first time” as a near-religious crime scene: lock the doors, close the curtains, fear the thunderbolt. The language is deliberately overlit, borrowing the melodrama of sin-and-punishment Christianity to describe an impulse that isn’t simply risky but taboo. It’s not just that someone might disapprove; the cosmos itself might intervene. That’s the point: the fear is internalized, pre-installed, a theology of surveillance that turns private desire into a potential public scandal.
Then Muir snaps the whole gothic setup with one clean punchline: “But I took to it like a duck to water.” The pivot is doing two things at once. It deflates the hysteria (maybe the thunderbolt was always a fiction) while also confessing something more destabilizing: the forbidden thing felt natural. That contrast is the engine of the quote. Danger isn’t evidence of wrongness; it’s evidence of a culture skilled at labeling certain appetites as catastrophic. The duck simile reads as both innocence and inevitability, suggesting an identity or calling that doesn’t need justification, only room to happen.
As a musician speaking from mid-20th-century Britain’s long shadow of propriety, Muir’s line carries the texture of rehearsal rooms, backstage experimentation, and the private rituals of becoming. It’s the sound of someone remembering how shame is taught - and how quickly instinct can outrun it.
Then Muir snaps the whole gothic setup with one clean punchline: “But I took to it like a duck to water.” The pivot is doing two things at once. It deflates the hysteria (maybe the thunderbolt was always a fiction) while also confessing something more destabilizing: the forbidden thing felt natural. That contrast is the engine of the quote. Danger isn’t evidence of wrongness; it’s evidence of a culture skilled at labeling certain appetites as catastrophic. The duck simile reads as both innocence and inevitability, suggesting an identity or calling that doesn’t need justification, only room to happen.
As a musician speaking from mid-20th-century Britain’s long shadow of propriety, Muir’s line carries the texture of rehearsal rooms, backstage experimentation, and the private rituals of becoming. It’s the sound of someone remembering how shame is taught - and how quickly instinct can outrun it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Excitement |
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