Daily Inspiration Quote by Mary Stewart

Soldiers, Stewart suggests, don’t become superstitious because they’re naive; they become superstitious because they’re rational enough to know how little control they actually have. The line lands with a novelist’s economy: it starts as a mild social observation, then tightens into a stark causal clause that turns “superstition” from a punchline into a survival tactic. “After all” is doing quiet work here, inviting us to treat the conclusion as obvious, almost inevitable. If you stand next to death long enough, you start bargaining with the universe in whatever currency is available.

The intent is less to mock than to reframe. Superstition in this reading isn’t a failure of courage or intellect; it’s a coping technology for environments where outcomes hinge on weather, shrapnel, timing, and errors you’ll never see coming. Rituals, charms, and omens become a way to manufacture a thin strip of agency when agency is otherwise stripped away. Stewart’s phrasing also gently punctures the cultural myth of the soldier as purely stoic machine. Proximity to death doesn’t harden people into granite; it can make them tender to patterns, signs, and stories.

Context matters: Stewart wrote in the long shadow of two world wars and a century that industrialized killing. As a British novelist known for suspense and psychological pressure, she understands how fear expresses itself sideways. The subtext is that belief isn’t always about truth; sometimes it’s about staying functional. In that sense, superstition becomes an emotional flak jacket: not logical, not pretty, but better than facing chaos unarmed.