Life & Mortality Quote by George Etherege

Etherege makes heartbreak sound less like a private misfortune than a surgical emergency. The line’s shock value is the point: love, once idealized as ennobling, is recast as pathology - “diseased,” “consumptive,” something that wastes the body and mind. By choosing the vocabulary of illness and euthanasia, he strips romance of its moral glamour and treats it as a condition to be managed, even terminated. The “violent death” isn’t merely melodrama; it’s a Restoration flex, a commitment to decisive self-preservation over sentimental endurance.

The subtext is almost colder than the imagery. “We” pretends to offer universal wisdom, but the “I cannot endure” exposes the real agenda: a speaker defending impatience, emotional self-interest, and the right to exit when desire curdles. “Lingering” is the real villain. Etherege isn’t railing against love so much as against dependency, delay, and the humiliations of wanting someone who no longer returns it. He makes prolonged longing sound indecent, like letting an infection fester.

Context matters: Restoration comedy thrives on speed, appetite, and the performance of nonchalance among the newly fashionable urban elite. Etherege’s characters trade in charisma and leverage; to “endure” is to lose. The line flatters an audience that prides itself on wit and control, offering a bracing ethic: if passion stops being pleasurable, kill it before it kills your status.