Love Quote by Anthony Trollope

Trollope punctures the romantic balloon with the calm efficiency of a man who has watched too many people mistake adrenaline for architecture. “Passionate love” is framed as a weather event: intense, brief, and disruptive. The sly jab is in “I take it,” a phrase that sounds modest but functions like social authority. He’s not confessing uncertainty; he’s invoking the accumulated evidence of drawing rooms, marriages, and reputations managed over decades. Passion, in his moral universe, is less a sacred flame than a household fire hazard.

The line works because Trollope doesn’t deny pleasure or feeling; he demotes passion from foundation to episode. “Troublesome” is the key Victorian dagger: not sinful, not tragic, just inconvenient. That choice reveals the subtext: the real stakes aren’t metaphysical, they’re logistical and social. Passion rearranges priorities, invites irrationality, and makes public life messy. In Trollope’s fiction, messiness has consequences: money gets mismanaged, alliances fracture, women’s futures can be gambled away on a mood.

Then comes the pivot to “mutual esteem,” which sounds bloodless until you notice the word “mutual.” Esteem is not solitary worship or obsessive projection; it’s reciprocated recognition, the daily acknowledgment of another person’s character. Trollope is arguing for a love that survives boredom, disagreement, and time - love as an ethical partnership rather than a private intoxication. It’s a deeply unglamorous ideal, and that’s exactly why it’s persuasive: he’s describing what lasts when the story stops being exciting and starts being real.