Love Quote by Jean Anouilh

Anouilh draws a knife-edge distinction that feels almost heretical: love isn’t life’s crown jewel, it’s the thing life can’t quite tolerate. The line works because it refuses the usual romance-story contract. Instead of treating love as a stabilizing force, he casts it as an insurgency - a private absolute crashing into the compromises, schedules, habits, and humiliations that make up “life.” The pause in “There is love of course” is doing heavy lifting: love is granted as a given, almost a formality. Then comes the pivot, cool and devastating, where life becomes the antagonist.

As a playwright marked by the moral bruises of 20th-century France - occupation, collaboration, the anxiety of compromised choices - Anouilh specialized in characters who want purity in a world built on negotiation. In that context, “life” isn’t nature or vitality; it’s the social machine: work, propriety, survival, the slow erosion of ideals by necessity. Love, by contrast, is presented as total, demanding, and therefore incompatible with mere getting-by.

The subtext is less anti-love than anti-sentimentality. Anouilh implies that if love means anything, it must threaten the normal order. It will make you late, reckless, disloyal to your own routines. “Enemy” is blunt on purpose: not a rival, not an obstacle - a force that wants love either tamed into companionship or crushed into memory. The line flatters no one. It dares you to admit how often “life” wins.