"Don't let love interfere with your appetite. It never does with mine"
About this Quote
Romance is supposed to be the grand disruptor - the force that makes you forget meals, miss trains, and write overwrought letters at 3 a.m. Trollope pricks that balloon with a pin so small it feels almost impolite: love, he implies, is rarely as annihilating as people perform it to be. The joke lands because it swaps the expected symptom of passion (loss of appetite) for the stubborn continuity of the body. Desire can be dramatic; digestion is relentless.
The line also flatters the speaker's practicality while quietly mocking it. "It never does with mine" reads like a wink from someone who prides himself on steadiness, even a kind of moral hygiene. But there's a sting underneath: if love doesn't interfere, maybe love isn't doing much at all. Trollope's Victorian world prized self-control and distrusted excess; this quip lets him register that cultural ideal while exposing its emotional cost. The appetite stands in for all the supposedly base urges that polite society tries to discipline - and Trollope mischievously admits the urges win.
As an author famous for chronicling institutions, routines, and the social machinery of marriage, Trollope understands that most "love stories" are less fever dream than scheduling problem. The subtext is not anti-love so much as anti-myth: people keep eating, keep functioning, keep choosing comfort over collapse. That's not cynicism for its own sake; it's a comic realism about how feelings fit, awkwardly, inside everyday life.
The line also flatters the speaker's practicality while quietly mocking it. "It never does with mine" reads like a wink from someone who prides himself on steadiness, even a kind of moral hygiene. But there's a sting underneath: if love doesn't interfere, maybe love isn't doing much at all. Trollope's Victorian world prized self-control and distrusted excess; this quip lets him register that cultural ideal while exposing its emotional cost. The appetite stands in for all the supposedly base urges that polite society tries to discipline - and Trollope mischievously admits the urges win.
As an author famous for chronicling institutions, routines, and the social machinery of marriage, Trollope understands that most "love stories" are less fever dream than scheduling problem. The subtext is not anti-love so much as anti-myth: people keep eating, keep functioning, keep choosing comfort over collapse. That's not cynicism for its own sake; it's a comic realism about how feelings fit, awkwardly, inside everyday life.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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