There's a time for departure even when there's no certain place to go.

The line expresses a recurring Williams theme: the necessity of escape when a situation has become emotionally or morally untenable, even if the future is undefined. “Departure” here is less a confident journey than an act of self-preservation—choosing motion over stagnation, and risk over the slow violence of staying. It captures the moment when clarity comes not as a plan but as a threshold: one may not know where to go, yet knows one cannot remain. In Williams’s dramatic world—marked by fragile hopes, confinement, and longing—this sentiment resonates as both tragic and liberating, suggesting that uncertainty can be preferable to a certainty of despair.