Life & Wisdom Quote by Veronica Franco

A line like this doesn’t beg forgiveness so much as it interrogates the court that hands it out. Franco’s “I wish it were not a sin to have liked it so” turns pleasure into evidence and then quietly disputes the legal code that would convict her for it. The grammar is a small act of resistance: she doesn’t deny the liking, doesn’t apologize for desire, doesn’t pretend it was coerced or accidental. She only questions the moral category assigned to it. That distinction matters. It recasts “sin” as a social label, not an eternal truth.

Franco wrote in Renaissance Venice, a city that monetized women’s sexuality while policing women’s virtue with equal fervor. As a celebrated courtesan and poet, she lived inside that contradiction: desired publicly, judged privately, and always at risk of being reduced to a cautionary tale. The line reads as both confession and strategy. It offers just enough piety to be legible in a Christian moral universe, while smuggling in an unapologetic interiority: liking is real, irreducible, and hers.

The subtext is a critique of the bargain women were forced to strike. Men could treat erotic experience as adventure; women had to translate it into guilt to remain socially intelligible. Franco’s speaker refuses the usual ending where pleasure collapses into self-loathing. Instead, she locates the problem not in the body’s response but in the culture’s demand that a woman regret having been alive in her own skin.