Love Quote by Dennis Potter

Potter is warning against the sentimental trap: the way devotion can turn into a soft-focus filter that edits reality into something more flattering, more survivable, and therefore less true. “To love it too much” isn’t an attack on love so much as an attack on excess attachment - the kind that demands the object of affection stay coherent, innocent, or redeemable. Once that demand kicks in, you stop looking and start curating.

The line works because it flips a cherished assumption. Love is supposed to be clarifying, a special access to the real. Potter suggests the opposite: love can be an instrument of misrecognition, a willing blindness that protects the lover’s story rather than the loved thing itself. “Obscure” is the key verb. It implies an active covering-over, not mere ignorance. You don’t fail to see; you choose not to, because seeing would complicate the feeling you’ve invested in.

As a dramatist, Potter was steeped in the mechanics of illusion: characters who lie, audiences who want to believe, narratives that reward denial until they don’t. His work often wrestles with desire and disgust sharing the same room, especially under the pressure of illness, memory, and self-mythologizing. In that light, the quote reads like a writer’s credo as much as a moral warning. If you love your subject - a person, a country, a past, even your own identity - too much, you start writing propaganda. The harsher ethic Potter proposes is bracing: affection that remains honest has to keep its eyes open, even when the view stops being flattering.