Love Quote by Kent Nerburn

Nerburn smuggles a surprisingly bracing argument into language that looks, at first glance, like soft-focus romance: love is not a consumer choice. By insisting "you don't choose love; love chooses you", he flips the modern script that treats intimacy like an optimized purchase - swipe, compare, upgrade. The verb choice matters. "Chooses" gives love agency and renders the self slightly powerless, which is exactly the point: the deepest bonds arrive as events, not decisions, and any attempt to dominate them turns them into something else (control, bargain, performance).

The line "accept it for all its mystery" is doing quiet defensive work. Mystery here isn't mere poetic fog; it's a boundary against our culture's compulsion to explain, diagnose, and manage feelings into predictability. Nerburn suggests that the healthiest response to love isn't certainty but consent: an active acceptance of not knowing where it leads.

Then he pivots from private rapture to public ethics. "Fills you to overflowing" frames love as abundance rather than scarcity, countering the anxious hoarding that so often accompanies attachment. The payoff is in "reach out and give it away" - love as circulation, not possession. Subtext: if love is something you cling to, you will shrink it; if it's something you transmit, it becomes a practice. Contextually, this feels like late-20th-century spiritual humanism aimed at readers tired of both cynicism and self-help transactionalism, offering a devotional model of love that is less about being chosen and more about what you do once you are.