Love Quote by Judith Krantz

Shopping, in Judith Krantz's hands, isn’t a frivolous pastime so much as a perfectly engineered relationship substitute: low-risk, high-reward, and rigorously consumer-proofed. The joke lands because it borrows the language of romance ("lose your heart") and then coldly swaps in the retail safety net ("you can return it"). That pivot is the point. Krantz is spotlighting a modern fantasy where desire comes with a receipt, where the messiest parts of intimacy - rejection, misjudgment, irreversible commitment - can be managed by policy and packaging.

The line also smuggles in a shrewd defense of consumption as a kind of self-sufficiency. "You can do it alone" reads like liberation, especially in the late-20th-century world Krantz chronicled: women navigating careers, status, and sexuality in a marketplace that sold both empowerment and scrutiny. Shopping becomes a private arena where you get to choose, acquire, and remake yourself without asking permission.

"Instant gratification" is framed without shame, but the final clause complicates it: "something you buy may well last for years". Krantz isn't just describing a dopamine hit; she's describing how objects can outlive moods and relationships, how a purchase can become a durable marker of identity, aspiration, or survival. Subtext: consumer culture is absurd, yes, but it’s also seductively rational. It offers permanence in a life that often refuses to.