Life & Wisdom Quote by Quentin Crisp

Crisp takes a feel-good cliche - "give and take" - and guts it with a scalpel. The line works because it mimics the tone of patient, reasonable advice ("It is explained that...") and then instantly declares war on it. That opening passive voice is doing quiet work: it frames the saying as social instruction, not wisdom, something handed down by the many to keep individuals compliant. When he calls it "untrue", he isn't nitpicking. He's exposing the moral scam inside the maxim.

The exaggeration is the point. "Give and give and give" turns reciprocity into a treadmill, the rhythm of the repeated verb sounding like unpaid labor. Crisp makes partnership less like romance than like a lifelong performance review, where the standards only tighten. The deathbed image - "flop into our graves exhausted" - is camp-macabre, a theatrical collapse that reads like a punchline and an indictment. It's funny because it's too much; it's biting because it doesn't feel entirely unearned. The final twist, "we didn't give enough", captures a familiar dynamic: the way relationships can become a venue for endless adjudication, where guilt is the currency and satisfaction is always deferred.

Context matters. Crisp, a gay man who lived loudly and vulnerably through eras of open hostility, understood intimacy as something negotiated under judgment. The quote's cynicism isn't nihilism; it's self-defense. He's not arguing against care. He's warning about the social expectation that "good" love equals self-erasure, then calling out the cruelty of a system that demands sacrifice and still calls it a failure.