It was very exciting for her, taking his dignity away in the name of love.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the paradox of love where one may feel excited by the power dynamics it creates.
In this quote, Kurt Vonnegut captures a complex aspect of love where the excitement of a relationship can lead someone to act in ways that strip another person of their dignity. It suggests that love can bring about both joy and a troubling kind of domination, challenging the conventional view of love as purely positive.
In practice
This quote can be shared in a discussion about the complexities of relationships during a couples therapy session.
But by accident, not by cunning calculation, books, because of their weight and texture, and because of their sweetly token resistance to manipulation, involve our hands and eyes, and then our minds and souls, in a spiritual adventure I would be very sorry for my grandchildren not to know about.
I was not an anthropology student prior to the war. I took it up as part of a personal readjustment following some bewildering experiences as an infantryman and later as a prisoner of war in Dresden, Germany. The science of the Study of Man has been extremely satisfactory from that personal standpoint.
How subservient to Jesus, or to a humane God Almighty, were the leaders of this country back in the 1840's, when Marx said such a supposedly evil thing about religion? They had made it perfectly legal to own human slaves, and weren't going to led women vote or hold public office, God forbid, for another eighty year.
All these people talk so eloquently about getting back to good old-fashioned values. Well, as an old poop I can remember back to when we had those old-fashioned values, and I say let's get back to the good old-fashioned First Amendment of the good old-fashioned Constitution of the United States - and to hell with the censors! Give me knowledge or give me death!
Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies - "God damn it, you've got to be kind."
If what Billy Pilgrim learned from the Tralfamadorians is true, that we will all live forever, no matter how dead we may sometimes seem to be, I am not overjoyed. Still--if I am going to spend eternity visiting this moment and that, I'm grateful that so many of those moments are nice.
For years your name never passed my lips, while my soul drank in, with a delirious thirst, all that was uttered in my presence respecting you.
When you fall in love, and you're very young, you think that that's the love of your life. And maybe it is, but it usually doesn't turn out that way.
Yet, she said to herself, form the dawn of time odes have been sung to love; wreaths heaped and roses; and if you asked nine people out of ten they would say they wanted nothing but this--love; while the women, judging from her own experience, would all the time be feeling, This is not what we want; there is nothing more tedious, puerile, and inhumane than this; yet it is also beautiful and necessary.
Twice or thrice had I loved thee before I knew thy face or name, so in a voice, so in a shapeless flame, angels affect us oft, and worshiped be.
Life is brief but love is LONG .
Every human being must be viewed according to what it is good for. For not one of us, no, not one, is perfect. And were we to love none who had imperfection, this world would be a desert for our love.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.