Love Quote by Dorothy Day

Dorothy Day’s line refuses the comforting order of operations we like to hear about love: feel it first, and the fear will dissolve. She flips the sequence with the hard-earned suspicion of an activist who spent her life around people society teaches you to avoid. “Love casts out fear” echoes Christian scripture, but Day doesn’t treat it as a magic spell. She’s pointing at the catch in the throat that comes before charity: the recoil from proximity, the nervousness about contamination, inconvenience, danger, moral compromise. Her “we have to get over the fear” is less self-help than moral diagnosis.

The key word is “close enough.” Day understood that distance is where abstractions live. You can “love the poor” at full volume from a safe neighborhood, in a fundraising letter, in a policy memo. You can even love humanity and still cross the street when a particular human approaches. Day insists that love, to be real, requires contact: sharing space, risk, and the possibility of being changed by the person you claim to care about. Fear isn’t just an emotion here; it’s the social technology that maintains boundaries and keeps hierarchies intact.

Context matters: Day’s Catholic Worker movement centered radical hospitality during Depression-era desperation and later amid war and state power. She’s urging a love that isn’t sentimental but practiced, and therefore contested. The subtext is blunt: if you’re waiting to feel unafraid before you show up, you may be waiting forever.