Love Quote by Armistead Maupin

A sly twist on the proverb that love is blind, the line suggests that the blindness is not a defect but a choice seduced by pleasure. The braille is a double entendre, at once the tactile script for the visually impaired and a stand-in for the sensations of touch: skin, texture, proximity, the body discovering another body. If sight symbolizes judgment and distance, braille stands for intimacy and the hands-on reading of another person. We overlook what is obvious because the act of feeling is so absorbing that clarity loses its urgency.

Armistead Maupin, with his urbane, queer sensibility and gift for turning cliche into lived experience, aims for more than a joke. He exposes the pact lovers make with themselves: we agree to be fooled a little, to ignore the red flags, because desire is not a courtroom; it is a playground, a rehearsal room, a maze of sensations where pleasure teaches as much as it deceives. The line captures the buoyant San Francisco spirit that infuses his work, where romance is messy, witty, liberating, and sometimes dangerous, and where humor softens the sting of folly.

There is a generous philosophy tucked inside the quip. People are not duped by love so much as they are complicit in their own enchantment, and that complicity is not always tragic. The tactile is not merely lust; it is the human urge to know by contact, to translate mystery through touch, to learn another person letter by letter. Of course this can mislead. It is also how closeness begins. The fun is the lure, but it is also the curriculum.

Rather than scolding, the line winks. Love does not go dark by accident; we dim the lights because, for a while, it feels better that way. And sometimes that pleasure is worth the price of what we do not see.