Love Quote by Laura Dern

Dern’s line lands with the easy confidence of someone who’s watched Hollywood sell women a false binary for decades: you can be taken seriously or you can be loved, but you can’t be both. By pairing “consummate artists” with “revolutionaries,” she stitches ambition and defiance into the same sentence, suggesting that for women, simply insisting on creative authority can already read as political. The “or whatever women want to be” clause is the sly pivot: it refuses the flattering cage of “strong woman” archetypes and widens the frame to choice itself, not any pre-approved version of empowerment.

The most revealing word here is “also.” It’s not begging for romance as a reward; it’s demanding that love stop functioning like a leash. Dern’s “have love” is practical, almost logistical, as if intimacy should be part of a full life rather than a competing job description. She threads in “not only for ourselves,” nodding to the self-love industry’s well-meaning but sometimes isolating message that women should solve structural problems with personal affirmation. Self-regard matters, she implies, but it shouldn’t become a substitute for being treated well.

Contextually, this reads as a post-#MeToo recalibration from an actress who’s navigated aging, motherhood narratives, and power dynamics onscreen and off. The subtext is clear: partnership isn’t an obstacle to women’s greatness; the culture that fears women with both agency and tenderness is.