“Arriving late was a way of saying that your own time was more valuable than the time of the person who waited for you.”

— Karen Joy Fowler, The Jane Austen Book Club

Source: The Jane Austen Book Club

Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Karen Joy Fowler27

American novelist, short story writer, editor 1950

Len Deighton book Funeral in Berlin

Funeral in Berlin (1964; repr. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966) pp. 144-5
Described there as a joke current in 1960s Czechoslovakia

“(To audience members who were arriving late) You haven't missed a thing, I was just killing time 'til you got here.”

Billy Connolly (1942) British comedian

An Audience With Billy - 1985

““Everybody who says the same words is the same person if the spectra are the same only they happen differently in time, you dig? But the time is arbitrary. You pick your zero point anywhere you want, that way you can shuffle each person’s time line sideways till they all coincide.”

Thomas Pynchon book The Crying of Lot 49

Source: The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Chapter 5, Mucho Maas

“Managers who extensively plan the future get the timing wrong. Sometimes they arrive to market too early and so must wait for the demand to catch up. Sometimes they are too late and so must accelerate to rejoin the future.”

Shona Brown (1960) businessperson

Source: Competing on the Edge, 1998, p. 135

“The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome.”

Derek Walcott Sea Grapes

Source: Sea Grapes

“No accident ever comes late; it always arrives precisely on time.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Source: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 2 (2013), p. 239

“Good afternoon, Marines. Thank you for your attention so late on a Friday. I know the women of Southern California are waiting for you, so I won't waste your time.”

James Mattis (1950) 26th and current United States Secretary of Defense; United States Marine Corps general

Opening remark made by Mattis in an address of 1st Reconnaissance Battalion Marines at Camp Pendleton in September 2002. As quoted by Nathaniel Fick, One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer (2005), p. 163.