Love Quote by Carl Sandburg

Sandburg’s line treats love less like destiny than like gravity: you trip into it, you tumble out, you do it again. The bluntness is the point. “Not deep” is a disarming admission that cuts against the romantic script where every attachment is supposed to be life-altering and morally instructive. He gives us a speaker who refuses to retroactively mythologize his own feelings. That refusal reads as both honesty and self-protection: if you declare the love shallow, you also declare yourself safe from its claims.

The repetition of “fell” does quiet work. It turns love into a physical accident, something that happens to the body before the mind can dress it up in meaning. “Several times” has a shrugging rhythm, the cadence of someone recounting weather, not epiphany. And then “fell out” lands like a deflation. It’s comic in its plain mechanics: love as a series of entrances and exits, no cathedral, no ruins.

Context matters because Sandburg’s persona is often the American realist-poet, tuned to labor, cities, ordinary speech, the non-heroic drama of daily life. In that register, romance is demoted from sacred quest to human habit. The subtext isn’t that love is fake; it’s that our culture overrewards intensity and underestimates the truthful middle: attachments that mattered in the moment, ended cleanly, and still count as living.