Life & Wisdom Quote by Elinor Glyn

A single flirtatious sentence, and Glyn is already puncturing the era's favorite fantasy: that morality can be engineered from the top down. "All the legislation in the world" is knowingly inflated, a hyperbolic stack of paper and authority meant to sound impressive until it meets the stubborn smallness of "kissing" - an act so ordinary, so portable, it slips through every legal net. The line works because it treats desire as both trivial and unstoppable, making lawmakers look faintly absurd for imagining they can police what happens in the inches between two faces.

The intent is not just pro-romance; it's anti-panic. Glyn wrote at a time when public behavior, sexuality, and "decency" were being aggressively managed through censorship and social reform campaigns, with the same anxious energy that fueled bans on books, films, dances, even hemlines. As a novelist associated with modern glamour and the cultural vocabulary of "It", she understood that desire isn't only private - it's a market, a mood, a social force. Attempts to regulate it often end up advertising it.

Subtext: the state can criminalize acts, but it can't abolish impulses. Kissing stands in for the whole tangled ecosystem of intimacy: courtship, pleasure, transgression, the thrill of doing something slightly forbidden. Glyn's wit lies in choosing the mildest symbol possible; if even kissing can't be abolished, the broader project of legislating virtue starts to look like theater - a performance of control rather than the real thing.