Daily Inspiration Quote by Lillian Smith

Smith’s line is a sly defense of unserious pleasures at a time when “serious” was often code for respectable, rational, and socially policed. “Need not feel ashamed” tips her hand: the real subject isn’t astrology, it’s shame - the ambient pressure, especially on women and nonconformists, to justify every curiosity as useful, scientific, or mature. By framing astrology as “flirting,” she shrinks the stakes on purpose. Flirting is play, experimentation, a low-commitment way of trying on possibilities. It’s also charged: a reminder that desire and imagination don’t need a permission slip from the grown-ups.

The repetition - “flirting with the zodiac… well worth flirting with” - works like a wink. Smith isn’t arguing that star charts are true; she’s arguing that people are allowed to want stories about themselves. The zodiac offers a portable vocabulary for personality, fate, and longing, a quick way to say “here’s what I’m like” when the culture’s official scripts feel cramped. That’s why it endures: it’s an informal myth machine that turns the chaos of daily life into patterns you can talk about with friends.

As a novelist, Smith knows the value of symbolic systems that hover between belief and metaphor. In the mid-century world of status anxiety and enforced normalcy, her permission to “flirt” reads like a small civil liberty: keep your skepticism, but don’t let it harden into joylessness.