Love Quote by Anita Brookner

Brookner turns romance into a long walk with blistered feet, and in doing so she quietly indicts modern self-protection. A “pilgrimage” isn’t a weekend getaway; it’s strenuous, devotional, and slightly irrational. You go because you believe in something you can’t quite prove, and you accept discomfort as part of the deal. By choosing that word, she frames love as an act of faith that reshapes the traveler, not a transaction that rewards good planning.

The knife twist is “when there is no strategy.” Brookner isn’t romanticizing naivete so much as naming the moment control collapses. Strategy implies leverage: timing texts, managing vulnerability, keeping options open, negotiating affection like a contract. Her line suggests real love begins where those calculations end - not because planning is evil, but because it keeps you at a safe distance from the very surrender intimacy requires.

Then comes the social diagnosis: “most people are strategists.” That’s less a scold than a bleakly observant historian’s note on a culture that trains us to optimize everything, including our hearts. In a world of reputational risk, economic precarity, and algorithmic choice, strategy becomes a survival skill. Brookner’s subtext is that we don’t fail at love because we’re shallow; we fail because we’ve been taught to treat uncertainty as a threat, not a doorway.

The quote works because it refuses the cheap consolation that love is simply “found.” It’s undertaken. Rare, not because it’s mystical, but because it asks for the one resource modern life rations most: unguarded commitment without a contingency plan.