Love Quote by Israel Zangwill

Zangwill punctures the romantic myth with a bureaucrat's pin: love, he implies, is not the engine of most lives but a boutique experience, as rare and demanding as high art. The first sentence is a trap. It sounds like an earnest inquiry, then swivels into an insult disguised as sociology. By invoking "the average taxpayer", he drags passion out of moonlit literature and into the fluorescent reality of ledgers, commutes, and civic obligation. The phrase is doing double duty: a stand-in for the modern, domesticated citizen and a jab at a society that measures people by contributions and compliance, not appetite or imagination.

The comparison to "grand opera" is especially barbed. Opera is expensive, time-consuming, and, to many, intimidatingly coded; so is Zangwill's idea of a "grand passion". He's not just saying most people don't experience epic love. He's suggesting they lack the training, leisure, and inner scale to sustain it. That carries an unmistakable class subtext: passion, like opera, belongs to those with access - to culture, to time, to a self large enough to dramatize.

Context matters. Zangwill wrote in a period when Victorian moral economies were colliding with modern urban life, mass politics, and consumer culture. His line reads like resistance to the sentimental democratization of romance in popular fiction: not everyone is a hero, not every marriage a destiny. It's wit with teeth, and it leaves a sour question behind: are our lives passion-poor because we're inherently limited, or because modern life trains us to be?