Love Quote by Arthur Miller

Memory is usually treated as a filing cabinet; Miller treats it as a locked room with bad ventilation. "Can anyone remember love?" isn’t a sentimental sigh, it’s an accusation aimed at the modern fantasy that our past feelings can be retrieved on command, like photographs. He lands the thought with a sensory trap: smell, the most intimate and least obedient of senses, the one that’s notorious for ambushing you rather than reporting for duty. You can’t "summon" it. That verb matters. It’s the language of séances and stage magic, hinting at the self-deception involved in trying to resurrect what was once involuntary and alive.

The cellar does a lot of quiet work. It’s not just darkness; it’s storage, neglect, and emotional mildew. Love, in this framing, becomes an object you can keep (a rose) but not a climate you can recreate (the perfume). Miller’s subtext is cruelly domestic: relationships don’t die only through betrayal or catastrophe; they die through relocation into the basement of habit, where the symbols remain but the atmosphere doesn’t. People cling to the evidence of love - the ring, the letters, the shared routines - while discovering too late that evidence isn’t experience.

As a playwright, Miller thinks in props and rooms, not abstractions. The image feels staged: someone holding a rose where it can’t possibly smell right, insisting it should. It’s a line that understands regret’s special torture: you can revisit the scene, even possess the artifact, and still be barred from the thing you came for.