Love Quote by Irving Layton

Love, in Layton's formulation, is less a halo than a bank statement. The line doesn’t flatter the reader with romance; it implicates them in a transaction. You don’t merely discover someone and fall-you invest. “Deposit” is a deliberately unpoetic verb, metallic and calculating, and that friction is the point: he drags love out of the realm of destiny and into the mechanics of projection. We “love in another’s soul” not what they are, but what we’ve managed to plant there-our values, our stories, our needs, our language. The “greater the deposit” becomes an uncomfortable measure of attachment: intensity tracks how much of the self has been risked, outsourced, or mirrored back.

The subtext is both tender and accusatory. Tender, because the act of depositing implies faith that the other person can hold something precious without breaking it. Accusatory, because it exposes a narcissistic bias: love can be less recognition than colonization. You’re moved by the parts of them that have been edited into compatibility with you. It’s a theory of intimacy as co-authorship, but also as a quiet takeover.

Context matters: Layton, a mid-century Canadian poet shaped by modernism’s hard edges and postwar skepticism, often favored blunt appetites over misty idealism. Here he’s puncturing the sentimental myth of pure, selfless love without dismissing love itself. He suggests what binds us isn’t mystery; it’s imprint. The line works because it makes the reader ask a bruising question: do I love you-or the version of me I’ve persuaded you to carry?