Love Quote by Marion C. Garretty

Mother love gets cast here not as a soft feeling but as an energy source: combustible, practical, and a little dangerous. Garretty’s word choice matters. “Fuel” implies expenditure. It’s something you burn through to produce motion, heat, survival. That framing dodges the sentimental pedestal and replaces it with a tougher image: love that powers late nights, risk-taking, self-erasure, endurance past reason.

The line also plays a neat rhetorical game with “normal” and “impossible.” By insisting the subject is “a normal human being,” Garretty lowers the bar deliberately, then vaults it. The subtext is democratic heroism: you don’t need exceptional talent or sainthood to perform extraordinary acts; attachment can manufacture capacity. It’s a poetic inversion of the usual myth that greatness comes from individual genius. Here, greatness is borrowed power.

Written by a poet born in 1902, the sentiment sits comfortably in a 20th-century cultural landscape that idealized maternal devotion while rarely naming its costs. That’s the quote’s quiet tension. It celebrates mothers, but it also normalizes a standard that can feel impossible precisely because it’s expected. The “impossible” may be literal (keeping children alive through scarcity, war, illness) or emotional (forgiving, staying tender, showing up again). Garretty’s intent is praise, but the line’s resonance today comes from its double edge: an anthem for caregiving’s real strength, and a reminder that societies often run on that strength without adequately repaying it.