Axiom: you are a sea. Your eye- lids curve over chaos My hands where they touch you, create small inhabited islands soon you will be all earth: a known land, a country.
Interpretation
This quote illustrates the deep connection and transformation that love can bring between two people.
In this quote, Margaret Atwood uses the metaphor of a sea to signify the vastness and depth of a person's emotions and personality. The speaker expresses how their interaction with the beloved creates new, meaningful aspects of existence ('small inhabited islands'), suggesting that love has the power to transform chaos into something familiar and known, ultimately leading to a profound sense of belonging and mutual understanding.
In practice
This quote could be used in a wedding speech to highlight the transformative power of love.
If I am good enough and quiet enough, perhaps after all they will let me go; but it’s not easy being quiet and good, it’s like hanging on to the edge of a bridge when you’ve already fallen over; you don’t seem to be moving, just dangling there, and yet it is taking all your strength.
I would like to believe this is a story I’m telling. I need to believe it. I must believe it. Those who can believe that such stories are only stories have a better chance. If it’s a story I’m telling, then I have control over the ending. Then there will be an ending, to the story, and real life will come after it. I can pick up where I left off.
What else can I do? Once you've gone this far you aren't fit for anything else. Something happens to your mind. You're overqualified, overspecialized, and everybody knows it. Nobody in any other game would be crazy enough to hire me. I wouldn't even make a good ditch-digger, I'd start tearing apart the sewer-system, trying to pick-axe and unearth all those chthonic symbols - pipes, valves, cloacal conduits... No, no. I'll have to be a slave in the paper-mines for all time.
We love each other, that’s true whatever it means, but we aren’t good at it; for some it’s a talent, for others only an addiction.
I've learned quite a lot, over the years, by avoiding what I was supposed to be learning.
Knowing too much about other people puts you in their power, they have a claim on you, you are forced to understand their reasons for doing things and then you are weakened.
What we have once enjoyed we can never lose. All that we love deeply becomes a part of us.
Alas! never had I loved him so well!
The sight of lovers feedeth those in love.
It's crazy, if you think about it. The God of the universe - the creator of nitrogen and pine needles, galaxies and E-minor - loves us with a radical, unconditional, self-sacrificing love. And what is our typical response? We go to church, sing songs, and try not to cuss.
There's a part of me which has always wanted to hear a man say, "Let me take care of you forever," and I have never heard it spoken before. Over the last few years, I'd given up looking for that person, learned how to say this heartening sentence to myself, especially in times of fear. But to hear it from someone else now, from someone who is speaking sincerely.
He painted me when I was young because he was in love with me, but now that he has loved me he doesn't paint me anymore.
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