Life & Mortality Quote by Kate Millett

“It would appear” is Millett’s scalpel: a cool, almost clinical phrase that pretends to distance the speaker from the mess, even as it drags us straight into it. The line performs a double gesture that’s central to her activist sensibility. First, it names a cultural diagnosis - not personal heartbreak, but an atmosphere. Second, it refuses melodrama’s clean ending. Love isn’t simply “dead”; it’s “very likely in a bad way,” a mordant afterthought that keeps the body on the table for examination.

That second sentence is where the politics live. “Dead” is final, romantic, operatic. “In a bad way” is everyday speech, the kind you’d use for an injured friend or a failing institution. Millett collapses the distance between intimacy and structure: love can be a private feeling, but it’s also a social arrangement shaped by power, gender roles, and the scripts people inherit. The subtext is less “we’ve stopped loving” than “the version of love we’ve been sold is failing under scrutiny.”

Context matters because Millett wrote and spoke in a moment when “love” was being used as a moral alibi: heterosexual domesticity as destiny, romance as proof that inequality was natural, even benevolent. Her phrasing punctures that alibi without replacing it with an easy slogan. It’s an activist’s pessimism with a trace of dark humor: not a funeral, but a prognosis. Love, in her telling, isn’t beyond saving - it’s just not well, and denial is part of the illness.