Time & Perspective Quote by C. S. Forester

The sting here is in the ellipsis: time is being “managed,” not found, and what they choose to do with it is casually deliver a death sentence in the language of administration. Forester frames the moment with a novelist’s eye for institutional cruelty - not loud brutality, but the kind that arrives on letterhead. The speaker isn’t rejected for service with dignity or regret; he’s informed that his continued existence is an administrative surprise, as if life were a clerical error soon to be corrected.

Forester, best known for war narratives that prize competence and composure under pressure, understands how modern conflict runs on paperwork as much as gunfire. The line captures a grim paradox of wartime systems: they can be both overworked and perversely efficient, still able to spare a minute to remind an individual of his dispensability. “No chance” isn’t just medical or logistical assessment; it’s a verdict on usefulness. The subtext is that a person’s value is being reduced to fitness metrics, while the human being on the receiving end is forced to translate bureaucratic speech back into existential terms: they expect you to die.

The dark humor - “really I should be surprised” - works because it mimics the tone of patronizing officialdom, then turns it against itself. Forester lets understatement do the violence. It’s not melodrama; it’s the chilly comedy of being alive in a world that has already filed you away.