Love & Passion Quote by Raymond Chandler

Chandler turns romance into a hangover in four brisk beats, and the speed is the point. He starts with a seduction narrative everyone recognizes - “magic,” then “intimate” - only to yank it toward habit and appetite. The joke lands because it’s structured like a toast and ends like a threat: pleasure isn’t condemned outright, it’s demystified. What begins as wonder quickly becomes choreography.

The line works the way Chandler’s best noir works: it takes a cherished story society tells itself and shows the machinery underneath. Alcohol, like love, isn’t framed as evil; it’s framed as predictable. The “third is routine” is the real gut-punch. Routine is where fantasy goes to die, where desire stops being a revelation and becomes a schedule. Then comes the last turn - “After that you take the girl’s clothes off” - a deliberately crude escalation that exposes the transactional underside of both drinking and courtship. It’s not merely misogyny-as-punchline (though the casual objectification is part of the period’s furniture); it’s a cynical diagnosis of entitlement: once the ritual has been repeated enough, the next step is assumed.

Context matters. Chandler, writing in the hard-boiled tradition, built worlds where intimacy is compromised by power, money, and boredom, and where romance often functions as a con in better lighting. This quip compresses that worldview into a barroom syllogism: enchantment is a phase, not a promise. The subtext isn’t “don’t drink” or “don’t love.” It’s “watch how quickly you start thinking you deserve the ending.”