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Parenting & Family Quote by Roman Polanski

"If you have a great passion it seems that the logical thing is to see the fruit of it, and the fruit are children"

About this Quote

Polanski’s line dresses itself up as common sense, but it’s really a sleight-of-hand: it turns one of life’s most morally loaded choices into a tidy piece of “logic.” The rhetoric is doing the work. “Great passion” arrives as something noble, even artistic; “logical” smuggles in inevitability; “fruit” makes reproduction sound like nature’s neutral outcome rather than a decision shaped by power, consent, timing, money, and desire. It’s a romantic metaphor with an accountant’s tone, as if the heart submits neat receipts.

Coming from a film director, the phrasing also borrows from the creative mythos. Artists talk about “projects” bearing fruit; Polanski quietly blurs the line between making art and making a family, framing children as the culminating product of intensity. That’s an appealing story in cultures that lionize genius: the passionate life should culminate in something tangible, something that outlasts the self.

The subtext gets sharper once you remember who’s speaking. Polanski’s public biography is inseparable from debates about autonomy and exploitation. In that light, the quote reads less like a warm endorsement of parenting than a worldview that naturalizes outcome and minimizes agency: if passion exists, the rest “follows.” It’s also a strategically soft statement, turning a complicated ethical landscape into pastoral imagery.

What makes the line work is precisely what makes it unsettling: it takes a charged subject and wraps it in orchard language, asking you to accept causality where there should be choice.

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TopicParenting
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Passion, procreation and legacy - Roman Polanski
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About the Author

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Roman Polanski (born August 18, 1933) is a Director from Poland.

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