Love Quote by William Faulkner

Faulkner’s line lands like a confession disguised as a shrug: love, he suggests, is too volatile, too compromised, to survive contact with ordinary life. The repeated "Perhaps" performs a kind of moral backpedaling, as if the speaker wants to believe in love’s real-world durability but can’t quite make the case. That hesitation is the point. It’s not romance; it’s damage control.

Putting love "into books" flatters literature, but it also indicts the world outside the page. In Faulkner’s universe, families rot from the inside, communities enforce cruelty as tradition, and desire is tangled with shame, class, and inheritance. Love doesn’t simply fail there; it gets repurposed into obligation, possession, or silence. The sentence quietly proposes an alternate habitat: fiction as an ark for feelings reality can’t keep intact.

There’s also a sly meta-literary sting. If love can only "live" in books, then the novel becomes both sanctuary and mausoleum. The writer preserves what life destroys, yet that preservation is proof of loss. Faulkner knew the Southern mythos depended on storytelling that beautified violence and betrayal; here, storytelling does something more tender, but just as uneasy. Love survives as language, as an aesthetic arrangement, not as a stable social practice.

The line works because it refuses comfort. It grants literature immense power, then makes that power sound like consolation for a catastrophe we’re all participating in.