Life & Wisdom Quote by Harry Crosby

Crosby’s line lands like a Valentine dipped in ether: tender on the surface, feral underneath. “Our little seamstress” is the first tell. The diminutive turns intimacy into possession, casting the third figure as both servant and accomplice. She’s not a romantic rival; she’s a technician of fusion, enlisted to do the dirty work of making two people into one sealed unit. In three quick props - thread, needle, mouths - Crosby turns love into a procedure.

The erotic charge is obvious, but the subtext is darker: a fantasy of control disguised as devotion. Sewing mouths together is a grotesque escalation of the lovers’ clichés (we finish each other’s sentences, we share one voice) into literal silencing. It suggests the desire not merely to be understood, but to eliminate the possibility of separation, refusal, or speech that wanders. In a modern key, it reads like an early articulation of codependency as aesthetic: if we can’t be apart, we can’t be betrayed.

Context matters because Crosby’s milieu prized extremity. A wealthy American expatriate in interwar Paris, he wrote with the swagger of the doomed modernist - intoxication, speed, death as a style choice. The image borrows from domestic labor and bodily violation at once, collapsing the genteel and the violent the way the 1920s often did when glamour masked damage. The sentence works because it’s too much: it doesn’t ask for closeness, it stages a ritual of irreversible union, daring the reader to confuse annihilation with romance.