Love Quote by Nizar Qabbani

Qabbani takes the most overworked romantic claim - love that "can’t be put into words" - and weaponizes it against his own profession: saying things. The line lands because it’s a retreat staged as a triumph. Instead of straining for metaphors, he chooses the audacious anti-poetic move: silence. It reads like a punchline, but the joke carries a bruise. If language is his instrument, shutting up is not just humility; it’s abdication, a refusal to perform feeling on demand.

The subtext is a critique of eloquence itself. Qabbani’s speaker knows how easily love turns into rhetoric, how quickly devotion becomes a speech, a letter, a polished arrangement of sentiments that flatters the writer as much as the beloved. By opting out, he implies that words can cheapen what they claim to honor. Silence becomes the only gesture left that can’t be accused of showmanship.

That tension is sharpened by Qabbani’s public identity. As a diplomat, he lived inside calibrated language: statements crafted to persuade, conceal, or smooth over conflict. Against that backdrop, "I decided to shut up" sounds like a private rebellion against the politics of phrasing. It also hints at intimacy as a realm where negotiation fails, where the smartest sentence is still inadequate.

The intent isn’t anti-romance; it’s anti-performance. He offers the beloved not an explanation of love, but a boundary: I won’t turn you into material. In a culture that prizes eloquence, the boldest proof of sincerity is refusing to monetize emotion in words.