He wanted to put his arms around her, but she had a darkness that seemed to stand beside her like an acquaintance that would not go away.
Interpretation
The quote expresses the struggle of wanting to connect with someone who is burdened by their own emotional challenges.
In this quote, the author conveys a poignant image of a person's yearning for intimacy and affection with someone who is emotionally distant or troubled. The 'darkness' represents the personal struggles or sadness that can obstruct relationships, suggesting that while love and support are desired, they can be complicated by past experiences or internal battles that linger, making it difficult for both individuals to fully connect.
In practice
In a discussion on mental health, this quote could illustrate the impact of emotional turmoil on relationships.
He would not let her go. Even though, staring into her open eyes in the swirling salt-filled water, with sun flashing though each wave, he thought he would like this moment to be forever: the dark-haired woman on shore calling for their safety, the girl who had once jumped rope like a queen, now holding him with a fierceness that matched the power of the ocean—oh, insane, ludicrous, unknowable world! Look how she wanted to live, look how she wanted to hold on.
Had they known at these moments to be quietly joyful? Most likely not. People mostly did not know enough when they were living life that they were living it.
Back and forth she went each morning by the river, spring arriving once again; foolish, foolish spring, breaking open its tiny buds, and what she couldn’t stand was how—for many years, really—she had been made happy by such a thing. She had not thought she would ever become immune to the beauty of the physical world, but there you were. The river sparkled with the sun that rose, enough that she needed her sunglasses.
Olive's private view is that life depends on what she thinks of as "big bursts" and "little bursts." Big bursts are things like marriage or children, intimacies that keep you afloat, but these big bursts hold dangerous, unseen currents. Which is why you need the little bursts as well: a friendly clerk at Bradlee's, let's say, or the waitress at Dunkin' Donuts who knows how you like your coffee. Tricky business, really.
And yet, standing behind her son, waiting for the traffic light change, she remembered how in the midst of it all there had been a time when she'd felt a loneliness so deep that once, not so many years ago, having a cavity filled, the dentist's gentle turning of her chin with his soft fingers had felt to her like a tender kindness of almost excruciating depth, and she had swallowed with a groan of longing, tears springing to her eyes.
I suspect the most we can hope for, and it's no small hope, is that we never give up, that we never stop giving ourselves permission to try to love and receive love.
There's something very lazy about the way you have loved him blindly for so long without ever criticizing him. You've never even accepted that the man is ugly,' Kainene said. There was a small smile on her face and then she was laughing, and Olanna could not help but laugh too, because it was not what she had wanted to hear and because hearing it had made her feel better.
Any relationship primarily built on physical attractiveness is predestined to be short lived.
You don't need to be told some things. You can sometimes tell more by a man's silence and the set of his head than by what he says.
Enjoy everything. Need nothing. Needing someone is the fastest way to kill a relationship .. The greatest gift you can give someone is the strength and the power not to need you, to need you for nothing.
...because when people have seen you at their worst, you don't have to put on the mask as much.
By the time you swear you're his, Shivering and sighing. And he vows his passion is, Infinite, undying. Lady make note of this -- One of you is lying.
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