Love Quote by May Sarton

Sarton’s line doesn’t flirt with metaphor; it indicts. Calling it a "privilege" is the knife twist: violence isn’t framed as an aberration but as a social permission slip, a benefit quietly granted to the anxious and the guarded. The quote turns fear of love into a political force, not a private quirk. Love here isn’t romance-as-ornament; it’s openness, tenderness, the refusal to armor up. That refusal can look like provocation to cultures built on control.

The subtext is that "murder" doesn’t have to mean literal bloodshed (though it can). It’s also the way communities punish the unashamed: shunning, institutional cruelty, reputational assassination, the slow suffocation of someone who won’t perform the approved version of desire. Sarton, a poet who wrote candidly about women’s interior lives and who lived as a lesbian in a century that treated such honesty as deviance, understood how quickly affection becomes evidence. The daring act is not merely to love, but to not fear love: to live without apology, to be legible in your longing.

The sentence works because it flips moral expectation. We think the fearless should have the advantage; Sarton argues the opposite. The fearful have leverage: they can brand love as threat, purity violation, weakness, contagion. Once fear is moralized, violence reads as protection. Sarton’s brilliance is naming that mechanism without comforting us with distance. It’s not monsters who do this. It’s the people who get to call their fear "order."