"The future is much like the present, only longer"
About this Quote
“The future is much like the present, only longer” lands with the deadpan clarity of an athlete who’s spent his life inside routines that don’t care about your grand theories. Dan Quisenberry wasn’t a philosopher by trade; he was a submarine pitcher whose whole job was to make repetition feel weirdly unpredictable. That matters here: the line isn’t dreamy or inspirational. It’s the locker-room antidote to future-casting, a shrug turned into a scalpel.
The intent is to puncture the fantasy that tomorrow arrives with a costume change. In sports, especially baseball, the season teaches a brutal kind of continuity: the same travel, the same aches, the same slumps, the same pressure, stretched across months. Quisenberry’s joke works because it sounds obvious after you hear it, which is exactly the point. It exposes how much of “the future” is marketing copy, a story we tell ourselves to justify procrastination or reinvention without effort.
Subtext: if you want a different future, you don’t wait for time to do the work. “Only longer” is a warning about accumulation. Whatever you’re practicing now - habits, avoidance, discipline, anxiety - doesn’t pause; it compounds. Coming from a late-20th-century sports figure, it also reads like a pre-social-media truth: progress is usually boring, unphotogenic, and indistinguishable from “just showing up” until it isn’t.
The line endures because it’s funny in the way reality is funny: not cruelly, just insistently. Time won’t save you; it’ll simply give you more of what you’re already doing.
The intent is to puncture the fantasy that tomorrow arrives with a costume change. In sports, especially baseball, the season teaches a brutal kind of continuity: the same travel, the same aches, the same slumps, the same pressure, stretched across months. Quisenberry’s joke works because it sounds obvious after you hear it, which is exactly the point. It exposes how much of “the future” is marketing copy, a story we tell ourselves to justify procrastination or reinvention without effort.
Subtext: if you want a different future, you don’t wait for time to do the work. “Only longer” is a warning about accumulation. Whatever you’re practicing now - habits, avoidance, discipline, anxiety - doesn’t pause; it compounds. Coming from a late-20th-century sports figure, it also reads like a pre-social-media truth: progress is usually boring, unphotogenic, and indistinguishable from “just showing up” until it isn’t.
The line endures because it’s funny in the way reality is funny: not cruelly, just insistently. Time won’t save you; it’ll simply give you more of what you’re already doing.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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