Thieves Like Us

The lyrics move between close observation of one person and broad claims about love. At first, the speaker sounds familiar with someone’s face and faults, but also critical of that person’s vanity. The repeated idea that love “belongs to us” then turns into a painful contradiction: love is described as something shared by everyone, yet somehow excluded from the speaker’s own relationship.

Several images make love feel both necessary and fragile. It “dies so quickly” but “grows so slowly,” suggesting that affection may take time to build and can be lost suddenly. Calling love “the air that supports the eagle” presents it as an invisible source of strength. By contrast, the image of love cutting life “like a broken knife” makes it seem damaging and unreliable, not simply comforting.

The song may be contrasting ideal ideas about love with the speaker’s disappointing experience of it. Love is praised as a cure for evil and said to be everywhere, but it is also called “uncool” and “unmentionable,” as if people have become embarrassed to speak openly about it. The repeated ending does not resolve whether love truly belongs to the speaker and another person, or whether that claim is wishful, bitter, or both.