Time & Perspective Quote by Thomas Malory

Malory’s line hits like a sigh from inside a ruined castle: a pointed reminder that even something as supposedly eternal as love has a history. “For love that time” doesn’t just mark the past; it elevates it into a moral climate, an age with its own rules of longing and loyalty. The phrasing feels almost judicial, as if the narrator is entering evidence into the record: things were different then, and not merely in costumes and customs.

The subtext is a defense and a warning. Malory is writing out of the late medieval world, with chivalric ideals already fraying under political violence and social change. When he implies that love “was not as love is nowadays,” he’s not reminiscing about better poetry; he’s policing a code. Courtly love, in the Arthurian imagination, is meant to be disciplined desire: bound up with honor, service, reputation, and the public consequences of private feeling. “Nowadays” suggests a slide into something thinner and more self-serving, where passion is unmoored from duty.

It works because Malory smuggles critique into nostalgia. He doesn’t have to sermonize; the comparison does the moral labor. Readers feel the pressure of a world where love is not a private lifestyle choice but a force that can topple kingdoms. In that light, the sentence becomes less romantic than political: a bleak acknowledgment that when love changes, society changes with it, and not always for the better.