Motherhood Quote by Dorothy Dunnett

Dunnett slips a love story into a casual aside and lets the logic of chance do the heavy lifting. She starts with "also", that modest little hinge that implies there are sensible, public reasons for her fondness, but the real engine is private history. The sentence isn’t trying to mythologize chess as a noble art; it’s doing something sharper: relocating a cultural practice into the bloodstream of identity. Chess isn’t merely a game she enjoys. It’s the improbable meeting point where her existence begins.

The line "met while playing chess" carries a quietly cinematic elegance, but Dunnett undercuts romance with the cool mechanics of the board. The implication is that intimacy can be born from structure, rules, and rivalry; affection emerges not despite calculation but alongside it. That’s a very Dunnett move for a novelist of intricate plots and strategic minds: she frames human fate as a system of moves, where personality expresses itself through choices under constraint.

"If it weren't for chess, I might not be here" lands as a joke you can hear her smiling through, yet it’s not throwaway. It’s a compact thesis about contingency, the way whole lives hang on small, ordinary circumstances that only later get retroactive meaning. In context, it reads like a writer explaining why certain obsessions recur in her work: not as intellectual decoration, but as inherited gravity. Chess becomes family lore, an origin myth with a grid.