"When you have a great and difficult task, something perhaps almost impossible, if you only work a little at a time, every day a little, suddenly the work will finish itself"
About this Quote
Dinesen turns the heroic fantasy of “the great and difficult task” into an almost domestic ritual: show up, do a little, repeat. The line looks like comfort, but it’s also a quiet rebuke to the grandiose ego that wants a single, cinematic breakthrough. By pairing “great” with “perhaps almost impossible,” she acknowledges the real scale of ambition, then undercuts it with a method so modest it sounds like housekeeping. That contrast is the engine: epic desire, incremental practice.
The slyest move is the last clause, “suddenly the work will finish itself.” Of course it won’t. Work doesn’t self-complete; people complete it. The phrasing shifts credit away from the self and toward the process, as if daily effort becomes a kind of enchantment. Coming from a writer who built ornate narratives out of patience and revision, it reads less like productivity advice and more like a philosophy of artistry: the muse is not lightning, it’s accumulation. “Suddenly” captures the psychological trick of long projects: the end often arrives not as a triumphal march but as a surprise, because the real labor happened offstage in small, forgettable sessions.
Context matters, too. Dinesen’s life included illness, displacement, and the long afterlife of experience turned into literature. The quote carries that hard-earned pragmatism: when circumstances make the “impossible” feel constant, you don’t conquer it in one blow. You outlast it by routine.
The slyest move is the last clause, “suddenly the work will finish itself.” Of course it won’t. Work doesn’t self-complete; people complete it. The phrasing shifts credit away from the self and toward the process, as if daily effort becomes a kind of enchantment. Coming from a writer who built ornate narratives out of patience and revision, it reads less like productivity advice and more like a philosophy of artistry: the muse is not lightning, it’s accumulation. “Suddenly” captures the psychological trick of long projects: the end often arrives not as a triumphal march but as a surprise, because the real labor happened offstage in small, forgettable sessions.
Context matters, too. Dinesen’s life included illness, displacement, and the long afterlife of experience turned into literature. The quote carries that hard-earned pragmatism: when circumstances make the “impossible” feel constant, you don’t conquer it in one blow. You outlast it by routine.
Quote Details
| Topic | Perseverance |
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