"The longer one lives, the more one realizes that nothing is a dish for every day"
About this Quote
Aphorisms like this land because they smuggle disappointment into the language of good taste. Norman Douglas doesn’t moralize; he cooks. "Nothing is a dish for every day" is a small, civilized sentence that quietly dismantles the fantasy of permanent solutions: the one perfect job, the one perfect lover, the one perfect ideology, the one perfect city. The longer you live, he implies, the more your certainty curdles into discernment.
The wit sits in the domestic metaphor. A "dish" sounds comforting, even indulgent, but Douglas uses it to argue for restraint. Appetite, habit, and novelty all change; what nourishes on Monday sickens by Friday. That’s not fickleness, he suggests, it’s maturity. Time teaches not just what you want, but how quickly wanting becomes routine, how quickly routine becomes resentment.
Douglas wrote as a cosmopolitan observer of manners and temperament, a traveler with a skeptical eye for systems and a palate for nuance. In that context, the line reads like a rebuke to the modern urge to optimize life into a repeatable menu. It’s anti-totalizing: a warning against making any single pleasure, principle, or person carry the whole burden of meaning.
The subtext is almost tender in its cynicism. If nothing works every day, then failure isn’t always failure; it can be information. The sentence offers permission to rotate your devotions, to accept seasons, to treat life less like a vow and more like a table: varied, occasionally unsatisfying, and saved from despair by the simple fact that tomorrow’s meal can be different.
The wit sits in the domestic metaphor. A "dish" sounds comforting, even indulgent, but Douglas uses it to argue for restraint. Appetite, habit, and novelty all change; what nourishes on Monday sickens by Friday. That’s not fickleness, he suggests, it’s maturity. Time teaches not just what you want, but how quickly wanting becomes routine, how quickly routine becomes resentment.
Douglas wrote as a cosmopolitan observer of manners and temperament, a traveler with a skeptical eye for systems and a palate for nuance. In that context, the line reads like a rebuke to the modern urge to optimize life into a repeatable menu. It’s anti-totalizing: a warning against making any single pleasure, principle, or person carry the whole burden of meaning.
The subtext is almost tender in its cynicism. If nothing works every day, then failure isn’t always failure; it can be information. The sentence offers permission to rotate your devotions, to accept seasons, to treat life less like a vow and more like a table: varied, occasionally unsatisfying, and saved from despair by the simple fact that tomorrow’s meal can be different.
Quote Details
| Topic | Aging |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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