Love Quote by Bette Davis

Davis frames adoration as something physical and mildly dangerous: not applause, but surf. "Wave after wave" turns the audience into weather, an elemental force that can lift you or pull you under. It also flatters the crowd while quietly admitting how little control the performer has once that tide turns. Love here isn’t intimate; it’s mass, anonymous, and still intoxicating.

The phrasing gives away a shrewd actor’s double vision. "Flooded" and "washed over me" suggest surrender, even obliteration of the private self. Yet she’s the one narrating it, shaping the memory with novelist precision. Davis was famous for projecting steel; this line lets vulnerability slip in without sacrificing authority. The stage becomes the only place she allows herself to be overrun, because that overwhelm is also proof of power.

Then comes the killer pivot: "the beginning of the one great durable romance of my life". Not a person, not a marriage, not Hollywood’s usual love-story machinery. She’s naming the romance as a lifelong bond with performance itself: the feedback loop between craft, spotlight, and an audience’s hunger. "Durable" is doing a lot of work - it’s an actress’s rebuke to the instability of men, studios, and gossip cycles. In an industry that sells women as disposable, Davis recasts her real commitment as something sturdier than any co-star or spouse: the stage’s promise that if you give everything, it gives something back, in waves.