Life & Wisdom Quote by Sara Teasdale

Desire, Teasdale suggests, is the one appetite that defeats its own logic. "No one worth possessing can be quite possessed" turns a romantic cliche inside out: the fantasy of having someone, wholly, as proof of love. Her key move is the double use of "possessing" - first as a value judgment (worth possessing) and then as an act of control (can be quite possessed). The line flatters the beloved while quietly indicting the would-be owner. If a person is truly valuable, they will have an interior life that resists acquisition. The more you try to close your fingers around them, the more you reveal you don't understand what you're reaching for.

Teasdale was writing in a moment when modern intimacy was being renegotiated: women pushing against Victorian scripts of submission, marriage marketed as stability but often experienced as constraint. As a lyric poet, she specializes in compressing emotional weather into clean, memorable speech. Here, the aphoristic neatness mimics a moral law, but the subtext is personal: love is not improved by tightening its boundaries. "Quite" matters. It concedes partial possession - the ordinary ties of commitment, shared life, even jealousy - while refusing the totalizing claim that another human being can be held the way property is held.

The intent isn't to romanticize distance; it's to set a standard. Worth, in Teasdale's framing, is inseparable from autonomy. To love someone admirable is to accept a remainder you cannot own.