He wanted to ask her what sound a heart made when it broke from pleasure, when just the sight of someone filled you the way food, blood, and air never could, when you felt as if you'd been born for only one moment and this, for whatever reason, was it.
Interpretation
This quote explores the profound emotional connection and pleasure that comes from deep attraction to someone.
In this quote, Dennis Lehane articulates the overwhelming joy and intensity of love, suggesting that the experience of being infatuated with someone can feel more vital and fulfilling than basic necessities like food or air. It captures the essence of a moment when one feels completely alive and destined for love, evoking a sense of both beauty and heartache.
In practice
This quote can be used in a romantic speech to express the intensity of love.
Life isn't happily ever after... It's work. The person you love is rarely worthy of how big your love is. Because no one is worthy of that and maybe no one deserves that burden of it, either. You'll be let down. You'll be disappointed and have your trust broken and have a lot of real sucky days. You lose more than you win. You hate the person you love as much as you love him. But you roll up your sleeves and work - at everything - because that's what growing older is.
Visitation Street is urban opera writ large. Gritty and magical, filled with mystery, poetry and pain, Ivy Pochoda’s voice recalls Richard Price, Junot Diaz, and even Alice Sebold, yet it’s indelibly her own.
The world does not have tidy endings. The world does not have neat connections. It is not filled with epiphanies that work perfectly at the moment that you need them.
Happiness doesn't lie in conspicuous consumption and the relentless amassing of useless crap. Happiness lies in the person sitting beside you and your ability to talk to them. Happiness is clear-headed human interaction and empathy. Happiness is home. And home is not a house-home is a mythological conceit. It is a state of mind. A place of communion and unconditional love. It is where, when you cross its threshold, you finally feel at peace.
I believe so deeply in the primacy of language, in lifting your prose to the highest level you're capable of and making your words symphonic.
It's good not only to realize that you can't please all of the people all of the time, but that you don't want to. There's a certain type of reader that you don't ever want to write for.
Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.
You, the strong, have I loved, though the marks of your iron hoofs are yet upon my flesh.
My little dog - a heartbeat at my feet.
Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you/ That you may be my poem/ I whisper with my lips close to your ear/ I have loved many women and men, but I love none better than you.
Our love was the affliction for which only our love was the cure.
Whatsoever is done out of pure love, be it ever so little or contemptible in the sight of men, is wholly fruitful; for God measures more with how much love one worketh, than the amount he doeth.
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