"Eventually you love people - friends or lovers - because of their flaws"
About this Quote
There is a quiet rebuke tucked inside Karen Allen's line: if you think love is a reward for perfection, you are still in the early stages of knowing someone. "Eventually" does heavy lifting. It suggests time as a solvent, dissolving the curated version of a person - the charming first-date self, the competent coworker self - until what's left is the unavoidably human remainder. The quote isn't romantic in a soft-focus way; it's practical, almost unsentimental. It insists that intimacy is less about accumulating reasons to admire someone and more about choosing what you can live with, even cherish, once the admiration stops doing all the work.
The turn from "despite" to "because" is the subtextual flex. Flaws become more than tolerated defects; they turn into identifiers, the quirks and fractures that make a person specific rather than interchangeable. It's also a thesis about attention: loving someone "because of their flaws" means you're looking closely enough to register the rough edges, and staying long enough for those edges to become familiar, even dear.
Coming from an actress, the line carries an implicit nod to performance. Everyone has a role they play at first. Real love arrives when the mask slips and you don't penalize the person for it. Allen frames mature affection as an act of recognition, not idealization - a commitment to the unedited cut.
The turn from "despite" to "because" is the subtextual flex. Flaws become more than tolerated defects; they turn into identifiers, the quirks and fractures that make a person specific rather than interchangeable. It's also a thesis about attention: loving someone "because of their flaws" means you're looking closely enough to register the rough edges, and staying long enough for those edges to become familiar, even dear.
Coming from an actress, the line carries an implicit nod to performance. Everyone has a role they play at first. Real love arrives when the mask slips and you don't penalize the person for it. Allen frames mature affection as an act of recognition, not idealization - a commitment to the unedited cut.
Quote Details
| Topic | Love |
|---|
More Quotes by Karen
Add to List










