"Love is not enough. It must be the foundation, the cornerstone- but not the complete structure. It is much too pliable, too yielding"
About this Quote
Crisp takes a word everyone wants to worship and treats it like an unreliable building material. "Love is not enough" lands as a provocation, but the craft is in how he narrows the attack: love should be "foundation" and "cornerstone" - essential, even dignified - yet still inadequate. He grants romance its ceremonial role, then cuts it down to size with an architect's metaphor. That move exposes his real target: the cultural fantasy that feeling can substitute for design, labor, and boundaries.
The phrase "too pliable, too yielding" is doing double duty. On the surface, it's a practical warning: love bends; it compromises; it gets reshaped by habit, fear, money, and exhaustion. Underneath, it's a critique of sentimentality as a social script, especially the postwar idea that marriage (and later, the couple) is sustained by emotion alone. Crisp, a gay writer who lived through eras when his kind of love was criminalized, isn't naïvely anti-love; he's suspicious of love being used as an alibi. If love is "enough", then no one has to talk about power, responsibility, honesty, or the daily logistics that reveal who actually gets cared for.
His intent is bracingly adult: build on love, yes, but don't let it become an excuse for structural neglect. The subtext is crisp (pun intended): feelings are easy to pledge; structures are what keep people from collapsing.
The phrase "too pliable, too yielding" is doing double duty. On the surface, it's a practical warning: love bends; it compromises; it gets reshaped by habit, fear, money, and exhaustion. Underneath, it's a critique of sentimentality as a social script, especially the postwar idea that marriage (and later, the couple) is sustained by emotion alone. Crisp, a gay writer who lived through eras when his kind of love was criminalized, isn't naïvely anti-love; he's suspicious of love being used as an alibi. If love is "enough", then no one has to talk about power, responsibility, honesty, or the daily logistics that reveal who actually gets cared for.
His intent is bracingly adult: build on love, yes, but don't let it become an excuse for structural neglect. The subtext is crisp (pun intended): feelings are easy to pledge; structures are what keep people from collapsing.
Quote Details
| Topic | Love |
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