The greatest lie ever told about love is that it sets you free.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that love is often misunderstood as a liberating force, when it can also bring constraints and challenges.
Zadie Smith's quote challenges the common belief that love is solely about freedom and liberation. Instead, it highlights the complexity of love, suggesting that while it can offer joy and connection, it can also lead to feelings of entrapment and obligation. This perspective prompts us to reflect on the dual nature of love, where commitment may come at the cost of personal freedom.
In practice
During a relationship counseling session, one might use this quote to discuss the complexities of love.
Because immigrants have always been particularly prone to repetition - it's something to do with that experience of moving from West to East or East to West or from island to island. Even when you arrive, you're still going back and forth; your children are going round and round. There's no proper term for it - original sin seems too harsh; maybe original trauma would be better.
You know, you don't expect everyone to be as educated as everyone else or have the same achievements, but you expect at least to be offered at least some of the opportunities, and libraries are the most simple and the most open way to give people access to books.
He did not consider if or how or why he loved them. They were just love: they were the first evidence he ever had of love, and they would be the last confirmation of love when everything else fell away.
We cannot be all the writers all the time. We can only be who we are. Which leads me to my second point: writers do not write what they want, they write what they can.
I think of reading like a balanced diet; if your sentences are too baggy, too baroque, cut back on fatty Foster Wallace, say, and pick up Kafka as roughage.
I never attended a creative writing class in my life. I have a horror of them.
I watched him, filled with tenderness and ache, wondering what it was that connected us. Was it the wounded places down inside people that sought each other out, that bred a kind of love between them?
Lovers can do their amorous rites by their own beauties
In fact, the Alejandro video...is a celebration of my love and appreciation for the gay community, my admiration of their bravery, and their love for one another, their courage in their relationships.
Beauties in vain their pretty eyes may roll; charms strike the sight, but merit wins the soul.
In our darkest hour, in my deepest despair,_x000D_ Will you still care? Will you be there?_x000D_ In my trials and my tribulations,_x000D_ Through our doubts and frustrations,_x000D_ In my violence and my turbulence,_x000D_ Through my fear and my confessions,_x000D_ And my anguish and my pain,_x000D_ Through my joy and my sorrow,_x000D_ In the promise of another tomorrow,_x000D_ I'll never let you part,_x000D_ For you're always in my heart.
That is the crowning evil, that we can even go so far as to love each other, you and I. And who else would show us a particle of love, a particle of compassion or mercy? Who else, knowing us as we know each other, could do anything but destroy us? Yet we can love each other.
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