Love Quote by Theodore Dreiser

Dreiser isn’t offering a valentine; he’s staging a truce between his famously hard-edged realism and a stubborn need to believe there’s something in human life that isn’t just appetite, accident, and social pressure. The first move is almost jarring: “I believe” repeated like a mantra, then undercut by “I do not understand it.” That’s not coyness. It’s Dreiser admitting that love, in his worldview, doesn’t submit to the usual machinery of explanation - economics, biology, class, desire - the forces his novels obsessively catalogue. He trusts it anyway, which is a radical posture for a writer so attuned to determinism.

The line “compelling power” gives love a physical gravity, less a sentiment than an engine that drags people into motion. It’s a useful word for Dreiser because it’s ethically neutral: love compels in the same way hunger compels. It can uplift, ruin, embarrass, liberate. He’s praising its force, not pretending it’s pure.

Then comes the sensory turn: “most fragrant blossom” against “thorny existence.” The metaphor doesn’t deny the thorns; it depends on them. Love is not the garden, it’s the brief, startling scent that makes the harshness bearable - and also sharper by contrast. In the early 20th-century American landscape Dreiser chronicled, where ambition and constraint grind people down, this is a small but defiant insistence that tenderness isn’t just a story we tell ourselves. It’s the one mystery he’s willing to keep.