Whether it's the best of times or the worst of times, it's the only time we've got.

Buchwald’s line riffs on the famous opening of Dickens’s *A Tale of Two Cities* (“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”), but turns that grand historical contrast into a practical, present-tense admonition. The point is less about judging an era as good or bad than about refusing to postpone living until conditions improve. By insisting that “it’s the only time we’ve got,” the quote collapses optimism and pessimism into the same imperative: act now, make meaning now, and take responsibility for how one meets circumstances. Its wit lies in using a canonical literary cadence to deliver a commonsense ethic of urgency and agency.