Love Quote by Lukas Foss

Foss is pushing back against the most stubborn modern fear about devotion: that to give yourself over to a person, a craft, a calling is to shrink, to disappear into somebody else’s story. He frames it as a “paradox” because our culture treats immersion like a kind of self-erasure, especially when the object of love is totalizing. Love is imagined as merger; artistry is imagined as obsession. Foss argues the opposite: immersion can be the mechanism of self-recognition.

The intent feels inseparable from a composer’s life, where “finding yourself” isn’t an inward meditation so much as a practiced intimacy with material. You become legible to yourself by spending time inside a difficult score, by returning to the same sounds until your preferences harden into identity. That’s why the key verbs matter: “immersing” is active, chosen, almost bodily. “Find” implies the self is not a fixed possession but something discovered through commitment.

The subtext is a quiet defense of intensity. Foss isn’t romanticizing dependence; he’s rehabilitating surrender as a form of agency. To “fall in love” is usually described as accident or loss of control. Foss reclaims it as a deliberate deepening, a risk that clarifies rather than confuses. It also reads like a corrective to the late-20th-century ideal of autonomy-as-armor: the notion that boundaries are the same as selfhood.

Contextually, Foss lived through a century that prized reinvention and distrusted attachment. His line insists that identity isn’t what survives love; it’s what gets made visible by it.