"When one is too old for love, one finds great comfort in good dinners"
About this Quote
Aging, in Hurston's hands, isn’t a noble glide into wisdom; it’s an appetite that changes venues. Love, that chaotic business of risk and longing, gets quietly swapped for something you can schedule, afford, and actually finish: a good dinner. The line is funny because it’s unsentimental. Hurston refuses the Hallmark arc where romance matures into a softer, purer form. Instead she sketches a sharper truth: when the body and the world start narrowing your options, pleasure doesn’t disappear, it gets pragmatic.
The phrasing does sly work. "Too old for love" isn’t a medical diagnosis; it’s a social verdict, the kind people internalize when desirability becomes conditional and public. Hurston hints at the way age can exile you from the drama of being pursued, chosen, or newly seen. "Great comfort" makes the substitution feel both soothing and a little sad - comfort is what you seek when you’ve stopped expecting surprise. Then "good dinners" lands with sensory solidity. Food is sensual without the vulnerability of intimacy; it’s desire with guardrails. It’s also communal on your terms: you can host, you can go out, you can be gracious, you can remain sovereign.
Context matters: Hurston chronicled Black life with an anthropologist’s eye and a storyteller’s relish for embodied detail - talk, music, bodies, kitchens, porches. Here, the kitchen becomes a stage where autonomy survives even as romance becomes socially complicated or personally exhausting. The subtext isn’t that love ends; it’s that people learn to reroute longing into pleasures that don’t break them.
The phrasing does sly work. "Too old for love" isn’t a medical diagnosis; it’s a social verdict, the kind people internalize when desirability becomes conditional and public. Hurston hints at the way age can exile you from the drama of being pursued, chosen, or newly seen. "Great comfort" makes the substitution feel both soothing and a little sad - comfort is what you seek when you’ve stopped expecting surprise. Then "good dinners" lands with sensory solidity. Food is sensual without the vulnerability of intimacy; it’s desire with guardrails. It’s also communal on your terms: you can host, you can go out, you can be gracious, you can remain sovereign.
Context matters: Hurston chronicled Black life with an anthropologist’s eye and a storyteller’s relish for embodied detail - talk, music, bodies, kitchens, porches. Here, the kitchen becomes a stage where autonomy survives even as romance becomes socially complicated or personally exhausting. The subtext isn’t that love ends; it’s that people learn to reroute longing into pleasures that don’t break them.
Quote Details
| Topic | Aging |
|---|
More Quotes by Zora
Add to List
