Love & Passion Quote by Billie Holiday

It lands like a torch song distilled to one clean sting: desire isn’t romantic when it stays theoretical. “A kiss that is never tasted” turns intimacy into something sensory and immediate, then snaps the door shut with “forever and ever wasted,” a phrase that sounds almost nursery-rhyme simple until you hear the cruelty in it. Holiday’s genius is how she makes that sing-song cadence carry adult regret. The repetition (“never,” “forever and ever”) isn’t poetic ornament; it’s the mind looping, replaying the moment you didn’t take.

The specific intent feels less like urging reckless passion than calling out the quiet, respectable cowardice of withholding. A kiss here isn’t just affection; it’s a risk, a crossing of a line. If you don’t cross it, you don’t preserve purity, you accumulate loss. That’s the subtext: restraint can be another kind of self-sabotage, especially for people trained to survive by staying guarded.

Context matters because Holiday didn’t sell fantasy. Her persona and repertoire made room for longing that’s already bruised by life - love shadowed by power, danger, and the knowledge that choices get narrowed by circumstance. In that light, the “wasted” kiss isn’t merely a missed flirtation; it’s a comment on how quickly tenderness can become unavailable. The line works because it’s both invitation and warning: pleasure isn’t guaranteed later, and nostalgia doesn’t count as experience.