"Love, with very young people, is a heartless business. We drink at that age from thirst, or to get drunk; it is only later in life that we occupy ourselves with the individuality of our wine"
About this Quote
Dinesen slices through the sentimental myth of youthful romance with the cool precision of someone who’s watched desire confuse itself for devotion. “Love, with very young people, is a heartless business” isn’t an insult aimed at the young so much as a diagnosis: early love can be ravenous, self-focused, and oddly indifferent to the person it fixates on. The cruelty isn’t always deliberate; it’s structural. When you’re new to longing, the feeling is the main character.
The wine metaphor sharpens the point because it refuses moral panic. Young people “drink…from thirst, or to get drunk” - not because they’re bad, but because they’re urgent. Thirst suggests need, lack, craving; drunkenness suggests experimentation, performance, the thrill of losing control. Both are forms of consumption. The beloved becomes less a distinct human being than a vessel: for validation, for adulthood, for escape, for narrative.
Then Dinesen slips in the real barb: “only later…we occupy ourselves with the individuality of our wine.” Maturity isn’t portrayed as purer; it’s more discriminating. The adult capacity she’s praising is attention - the willingness to taste, to notice, to care about particularity. In love, that means shifting from using someone to encountering them.
Context matters here: Dinesen writes out of a world of cultivated sensibility, where refinement is not snobbery but a moral faculty. She’s arguing that tenderness is learned, and that what we call “young love” often isn’t love at all - it’s appetite, dressed up as fate.
The wine metaphor sharpens the point because it refuses moral panic. Young people “drink…from thirst, or to get drunk” - not because they’re bad, but because they’re urgent. Thirst suggests need, lack, craving; drunkenness suggests experimentation, performance, the thrill of losing control. Both are forms of consumption. The beloved becomes less a distinct human being than a vessel: for validation, for adulthood, for escape, for narrative.
Then Dinesen slips in the real barb: “only later…we occupy ourselves with the individuality of our wine.” Maturity isn’t portrayed as purer; it’s more discriminating. The adult capacity she’s praising is attention - the willingness to taste, to notice, to care about particularity. In love, that means shifting from using someone to encountering them.
Context matters here: Dinesen writes out of a world of cultivated sensibility, where refinement is not snobbery but a moral faculty. She’s arguing that tenderness is learned, and that what we call “young love” often isn’t love at all - it’s appetite, dressed up as fate.
Quote Details
| Topic | Love |
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