You were always uncomfortable with the rhetoric of emotion, which is quite a different matter from discomfort with emotion itself.
Interpretation
The quote distinguishes between being uncomfortable with emotional expressions and the emotions themselves.
Lionel Shriver's quote highlights a nuanced understanding of emotions and their communication. It suggests that while some individuals may find expressing emotions through rhetoric or language to be uncomfortable, it doesn't necessarily mean they are averse to feeling those emotions deeply. This distinction emphasizes the complexity of human emotional experiences—showing that discomfort may arise from the way emotions are conveyed rather than the feelings themselves.
In practice
This quote can be used in a psychology seminar to discuss emotional intelligence.
Yet if there's no reason to live without a child, how could there be with one? To answer one life with a successive life is simply to transfer the onus of purpose to the next generation; the displacements amounts to a cowardly and potentially infinite delay. Your children's answer, presumably, will be to procreate as well, and in doing so to distract themselves, to foist their own aimlessness onto their offspring.
For pity's sake, if you don't take a shine to a novel, there are loads more in the world; read something else. Continue suffering, and it's not the author's fault. It's yours.
In my country, we're sufficiently consumed by the concept of happiness that the right to its pursuit is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. But what is happiness?
In the big picture I write for an audience of people I've never met. By the final draft I'm looking for anything in the prose that's prospectively boring to strangers.
Not that happiness is dull. Only that it doesn't tell well. And of our consuming diversions as we age is to recite, not only to others but to ourselves, our own story.
Children live in the same world we do. To kid ourselves that we can shelter them from it isn't just naive it's a vanity.
For most gulls it was not flying that matters, but eating. For this gull, though, it was not eating that mattered, but flight.
I am oppressed with a dread of living forever. That is the only disadvantage of vegetarianism.
Simple assent to the gospel, divorced from a transforming commitment to the living Christ, is by Biblical standards less than faith, and less than saving, and to elicit only assent of this kind would be to secure only false conversions.
Although, I admit, I desire, Occasionally, some backtalk From the mute sky, I can't honestly complain: A certain minor light may still Lean incandescent Out of kitchen table or chair As if a celestial burning took Possession of the most obtuse objects now and then --
Sincerity is an openness of heart; we find it in very few people; what we usually see is only an artful dissimulation to win the confidence of others.
the neighborhood is nothing but a protective zone- remodeling, disinfection, a snobbish and hygenic design- but above all in a figurative sense: it is a machine for making emptiness.
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