"Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish it's source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings"
About this Quote
Nin refuses the comforting myth that love simply "runs its course". She frames its end as avoidable, almost managerial: love dies not of age but of neglect, incompetence, and small human failures. That’s the sting in her rhetoric. By denying love a "natural death", she drags romance out of the realm of fate and into the realm of responsibility, where people can be held accountable for what they stop tending.
The sentence structure does the real work. "It dies because..". repeats like a drumbeat, turning heartbreak into a case file. Each cause escalates from the abstract to the bodily: "blindness" and "errors" read like character flaws; "betrayals" adds moral heat; then come "illness and wounds" and finally "weariness", the quiet killer that doesn’t require villains, just time and depletion. The last cluster - "witherings, tarnishings" - lands like a slow fade-out, not an explosion. Nin’s point isn’t that love is fragile; it’s that love is an ongoing practice that can be damaged in multiple registers: perception, ethics, health, stamina.
Context matters: Nin wrote from a modernist, psycho-sexual milieu obsessed with interior life, self-deception, and the stories we tell to justify our choices. The subtext is almost therapeutic: if love is a source, it must be replenished - with attention, honesty, repair. Romance isn’t destiny here; it’s maintenance, and the tragedy is how often we mistake neglect for inevitability.
The sentence structure does the real work. "It dies because..". repeats like a drumbeat, turning heartbreak into a case file. Each cause escalates from the abstract to the bodily: "blindness" and "errors" read like character flaws; "betrayals" adds moral heat; then come "illness and wounds" and finally "weariness", the quiet killer that doesn’t require villains, just time and depletion. The last cluster - "witherings, tarnishings" - lands like a slow fade-out, not an explosion. Nin’s point isn’t that love is fragile; it’s that love is an ongoing practice that can be damaged in multiple registers: perception, ethics, health, stamina.
Context matters: Nin wrote from a modernist, psycho-sexual milieu obsessed with interior life, self-deception, and the stories we tell to justify our choices. The subtext is almost therapeutic: if love is a source, it must be replenished - with attention, honesty, repair. Romance isn’t destiny here; it’s maintenance, and the tragedy is how often we mistake neglect for inevitability.
Quote Details
| Topic | Heartbreak |
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