Love Quote by Anita Brookner

Brookner treats romance like a small, bright republic that inevitably gets annexed by reality. The line is almost disarmingly neat: love has an "essence", and that essence is not devotion, compatibility, or even pleasure, but the beginning. She elevates the prologue over the plot, suggesting that romantic love is structurally front-loaded: the heightened attention, the imagined futures, the sense that the world has briefly arranged itself around two people. After that, she says, the governing conditions shift to "sadness and impossibility" not as exceptions but as "the rule."

The subtext is less cynical than exacting. Brookner is diagnosing a cultural script in which desire depends on uncertainty. Beginnings thrive on projection; the lover is partly a person and partly a canvas. Once knowledge accumulates, the projections collapse under detail: habits, histories, obligations, mismatched appetites. "Impossibility" is a sharp choice because it implies not merely disappointment but incompatibility at the level of structure. What becomes impossible is the continuation of the beginning itself.

As a historian by training and a novelist by temperament, Brookner writes like someone alert to patterns and their costs. Her work often circles polite interiors, emotional restraint, and the quiet attrition of hopes that were never quite permitted to become demands. The sentence carries that social intelligence: romance is not only a private feeling but a time-bound arrangement, shaped by expectations about what love should feel like. She gives the reader the sugar of recognition, then the steel of prognosis.