When I have one martini, I feel bigger, wiser, taller. When I have a second, I feel superlative. When I have more, there's no holding me.
William FaulknerRead
She is like all the rest of them. Whether they are seventeen or fortyseven, when they finally come to surrender completely, it's going to be in words.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that emotional surrender or vulnerability in relationships ultimately expresses itself through words, regardless of age.
William Faulkner’s quote emphasizes that, despite age or external differences, a fundamental truth of human relationships is that the act of surrendering oneself fully—be it in love, trust, or vulnerability—manifest through spoken words. This highlights the importance of communication and honesty in deepening connections with others.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about the importance of honesty in relationships.
When I have one martini, I feel bigger, wiser, taller. When I have a second, I feel superlative. When I have more, there's no holding me.
I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.
When grown people speak of the innocence of children, they dont really know what they mean. Pressed, they will go a step further and say, Well, ignorance then. The child is neither. There is no crime which a boy of eleven had not envisaged long ago. His only innocence is, he may not be old enough to desire the fruits of it...his ignorance is, he does not know how to commit it...
Maybe times are never strange to women: it is just one continuous monotonous thing full of the repeated follies of their menfolks.
He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn't need a word for that any more than for pride or fear....One day I was talking to Cora. She prayed for me because she believed I was blind to sin, wanting me to kneel and pray too, because people to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.
Ever since then I have believed that God is not only a gentleman and a sport; he is a Kentuckian too.
A genuine relationship is one that is not dominated by the ego with its image-making and self-seeking. In a genuine relationship, there is an outward flow of open, alert attention toward the other person in which there is no wanting whatsoever.
I fervently believe that people shouldn't stay in bad relationships just because of some artificial rom-com notion of true love being "forever." In fact, I think that the pressure of conforming to that framework ruins-literally RUINS-a lot of people's lives.
It's difficult to seek other people's love. It's deadly. In seeking it you lose what is genuine. This is the prison we create for ourselves as we seek what we already have.
Grief can be a slow ache that never seems to stop rising, yet as we grieve, those we love mysteriously become more and more a part of who we are.
One of the better guarantors of ending up in a good relationship: an advanced capacity to be alone.
In every democracy, it is the people's will that is supreme. We should translate the intense yearning of the people of India and Pakistan for friendship into meaningful measures of cooperation in every walk of life.
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