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.
Taking the kids from our districts, forcing them to kill one another while we watch – this is the Capitol’s way of reminding us how totally we are at their mercy. How little chance we would stand of surviving another rebellion. Whatever words they use, the real message is clear. “Look how we take your children and sacrifice them and there’s nothing you can do. If you lift a finger, we will destroy every last one of you. Just as we did in District Thirteen
Oftentimes I deliberately put ambiguity into my books so that... the reader is left with an echo of: 'How much of this was from me?'
War is like love, it always finds a way.
Lying is the most simple form of self-defence.
We want to avoid suffering, death, sin, ashes. But we live in a world crushed and broken and torn, a world God Himself visited to redeem. We receive his poured-out life, and being allowed the high privilege of suffering with Him, may then pour ourselves out for others.
No animal ever invented anything as bad as drunkenness - or so good as drink.
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