Wit & Attitude Quote by C. S. Forester

A whole social ecosystem snaps into focus in one self-incriminating sentence: admirers give chase, the admired gives chase to someone else, and everyone loses dignity at speed. Forester’s narrator doesn’t posture as a romantic hero; he stages himself as a link in a chain of appetite and delusion. The line’s engine is repetition with a twist: “ran after” lands twice, first as vanity (being pursued), then as compulsion (pursuing). The symmetry is funny, but it’s also bleak: desire isn’t a grand exception to human folly, it’s the most predictable form of it.

“Fools” and “whores” are blunt categories, less about individual people than about roles in a transactional world. Calling the pursuers “fools” flatters the speaker for a beat, then the second clause flips that smugness into self-exposure. The admission “foolish though I realized such a proceeding to be” adds a crucial modern note: self-awareness doesn’t redeem him, it damns him. He knows the script, names it as stupid, and runs anyway. That’s not confession as moral cleansing; it’s confession as diagnosis.

Forester, best known for writing about duty, hierarchy, and masculine codes (especially in naval settings), often tracks the gap between self-command and private weakness. This line reads like the off-deck corollary to military order: even men trained to calculate risk will volunteer for emotional or sexual humiliation. The intent isn’t titillation so much as demystification - a crisp portrait of how status, longing, and shame circulate in the same closed loop.