"Each time you love, love as deeply as if it were forever"
About this Quote
Auden once warned that “poetry makes nothing happen,” but Audre Lorde’s line is engineered to do the opposite: to change the way you risk yourself. “Each time” rejects the fantasy of a single, culminating romance and replaces it with repetition, practice, accountability. Love isn’t a destiny here; it’s a verb you’re asked to do again and again, in real time, under pressure.
The knife-edge is in the conditional: “as if it were forever.” Lorde isn’t promising permanence; she’s staging a disciplined illusion. You love with the full-bodied commitment of eternity while knowing, because you’re alive and paying attention, that nothing is guaranteed to last. That tension is the whole point. The line refuses the common alibi for emotional withholding: why invest if it might end? Lorde’s answer is bracingly unsentimental: invest anyway, because a love measured out in self-protective teaspoons is already a kind of ending.
Context matters because Lorde’s work is steeped in the politics of survival: Black feminist, lesbian, mother, organizer, living amid systems that routinely tried to make certain lives provisional. Read that way, “forever” is less a romantic promise than a stance against disposability. Love becomes an act of resistance, a chosen depth in a culture that encourages detachment, ironic distance, and strategic cool.
The intent is not naive intensity; it’s radical presence. If the world is unstable, Lorde insists your tenderness doesn’t have to be.
The knife-edge is in the conditional: “as if it were forever.” Lorde isn’t promising permanence; she’s staging a disciplined illusion. You love with the full-bodied commitment of eternity while knowing, because you’re alive and paying attention, that nothing is guaranteed to last. That tension is the whole point. The line refuses the common alibi for emotional withholding: why invest if it might end? Lorde’s answer is bracingly unsentimental: invest anyway, because a love measured out in self-protective teaspoons is already a kind of ending.
Context matters because Lorde’s work is steeped in the politics of survival: Black feminist, lesbian, mother, organizer, living amid systems that routinely tried to make certain lives provisional. Read that way, “forever” is less a romantic promise than a stance against disposability. Love becomes an act of resistance, a chosen depth in a culture that encourages detachment, ironic distance, and strategic cool.
The intent is not naive intensity; it’s radical presence. If the world is unstable, Lorde insists your tenderness doesn’t have to be.
Quote Details
| Topic | Love |
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