"Kindness and intelligence don't always deliver us from the pitfalls and traps: there are always failures of love, of will, of imagination. There is no way to take the danger out of human relationships"
About this Quote
Harrison refuses the comforting myth that being a decent, perceptive person is a kind of emotional insurance policy. The line opens with a bait-and-switch: “kindness and intelligence” sound like the two traits we’re told can civilize anything, even romance. Then she undercuts them with “don’t always,” a small phrase that punctures a whole self-help industry’s worth of implied guarantees. The point isn’t that kindness is useless; it’s that virtue isn’t strategy. You can do everything “right” and still get hurt, still hurt someone, still misread the room where it matters most.
Her real target is control. “Pitfalls and traps” casts relationships as terrain, not destiny: you’re moving, choosing, improvising, and the ground can still give way. When she lists the failures - “of love, of will, of imagination” - she’s mapping the main ways intimacy collapses. Love fails when affection can’t translate into care. Will fails when we can’t sustain the hard, repetitive labor of showing up. Imagination fails when we can’t picture the other person as fully human, with interior weather that doesn’t match our script.
The closing sentence is almost stubborn in its clarity: danger isn’t an accident inside relationships; it’s baked into the premise. To attach is to risk misunderstanding, betrayal, boredom, dependency, abandonment - and also the humiliating truth that we’re not always the hero of our own emotional narrative. Coming from a writer of candid, unsentimental personal criticism, it reads like a corrective to moralized romance: intimacy is not a meritocracy. It’s a contact sport, even for the well-intentioned.
Her real target is control. “Pitfalls and traps” casts relationships as terrain, not destiny: you’re moving, choosing, improvising, and the ground can still give way. When she lists the failures - “of love, of will, of imagination” - she’s mapping the main ways intimacy collapses. Love fails when affection can’t translate into care. Will fails when we can’t sustain the hard, repetitive labor of showing up. Imagination fails when we can’t picture the other person as fully human, with interior weather that doesn’t match our script.
The closing sentence is almost stubborn in its clarity: danger isn’t an accident inside relationships; it’s baked into the premise. To attach is to risk misunderstanding, betrayal, boredom, dependency, abandonment - and also the humiliating truth that we’re not always the hero of our own emotional narrative. Coming from a writer of candid, unsentimental personal criticism, it reads like a corrective to moralized romance: intimacy is not a meritocracy. It’s a contact sport, even for the well-intentioned.
Quote Details
| Topic | Relationship |
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