Love Quote by Robertson Davies

Davies slips a needle into the inflated romantic balloon: love is pleasurable, yes, but it’s also a system that needs maintenance, not constant fireworks. The line hinges on a sly inversion of what popular storytelling sells. We’re trained to treat passion as the proof of love; Davies treats it as a spice. “Occasional” is doing the real work here, puncturing the fantasy of permanent intensity and replacing it with something closer to adult realism: desire that flares and recedes, not a bonfire that must be fed at all costs.

The second half lands with a novelist’s dry authority. “Common sense continual” isn’t a buzzkill; it’s the infrastructure. Davies is gesturing at the unsexy arts - restraint, judgment, timing, the ability to distinguish infatuation from intimacy. The subtext is almost comic in its bluntness: if you want love to remain pleasurable, stop demanding that it behave like melodrama. Passion, when made compulsory, curdles into performance, jealousy, or exhaustion. Kept intermittent, it retains surprise and charge.

Context matters: Davies wrote from a mid-century Canadian vantage point, suspicious of postwar modernity’s appetite for sensation and self-mythologizing. His fiction often treats adulthood as an education in illusion-breaking. This sentence is a miniature of that project - anti-romantic without being anti-love, insisting that the real erotic triumph isn’t intensity but durability. Common sense isn’t the enemy of romance; it’s what keeps romance from eating its own tail.