Love Quote by James Broughton

Broughton’s line lands like a pep talk and a provocation: love isn’t the garnish on a “successful” life, it’s the metric. Coming from a director-poet who lived in and around mid-century American avant-garde circles, the sentence reads less like greeting-card wisdom and more like an artistic manifesto. It argues for a daily practice of affection, attention, and risk-taking as the only time well spent.

The phrasing does a lot of quiet work. “Fill your days” turns love into an active verb and a scheduling problem: not a mood that visits you, but something you make room for, over and over, against distraction and inertia. The second clause sharpens it with moral accounting. “Wasting your life” is deliberately blunt, almost puritan in its judgment, but the target isn’t pleasure; it’s avoidance. The subtext is that a life can look busy, productive, respectable - and still be empty if it’s insulated from intimacy, community, erotic honesty, or creative devotion.

Context matters here. Broughton’s era asked artists to choose between conformity and candor, especially around sexuality and emotional expressiveness. His work often leaned into celebration, play, and the body as something sacred rather than shameful. In that light, “love” expands beyond romance into a stance toward the world: generous curiosity, unembarrassed feeling, chosen kinship. The line works because it refuses the modern compromise of treating love as “personal” and therefore secondary. It makes love the main plot, and everything else a subplot.