Wit & Attitude Quote by Hugh Leonard

Leonard guts the comforting myth that we can edit ourselves. The line refuses the usual redemption arc where a person is either their worst act or their best self “deep down.” Instead, identity is a blunt inventory: foolishness, crimes, kindnesses, all carried at once. It’s moral accounting without the escape hatch of amnesia.

What makes it land is its double pressure. First, the “we are” construction is mercilessly present-tense. Not “we were,” not “we did and learned from it,” but we are those actions still. That’s a dramatist’s instinct: character isn’t an essence; it’s behavior with consequences that keeps echoing in the room long after the scene ends. Second, Leonard pivots from ethics to metaphysics. Just when the listener braces for a sermon about guilt or grace, he undercuts the premise that time itself is a stable container. “I hate to think of life as if we understood time” is a quiet attack on the narratives we build to make living feel linear and legible: mistake, lesson, closure.

The subtext is tenderness disguised as severity. If time is not something we “understand,” then our obsession with tidy moral chronology becomes suspect. People don’t evolve in a straight line; remorse can arrive late, kindness can be forgotten, harm can outlast intention. Leonard, writing for stages where the past barges into the present mid-dialogue, frames time as the ultimate unreliable narrator. The intent isn’t to absolve anyone; it’s to puncture the fantasy that life will provide a clean edit and a final cut.