We're more of the love, blood, and rhetoric school. Well, we can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and we can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and we can do you all three concurrent or consecutive. But we can't give you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory. They're all blood, you see.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the essential connection of love, sacrifice, and rhetoric in relationships and life.
In this quote, Tom Stoppard explores the intertwined nature of love, sacrifice ('blood'), and expression ('rhetoric') in human experiences. He indicates that while one can experience emotional connections (love) or express oneself (rhetoric) in various forms, true authenticity and depth require 'blood'—the sacrifices and struggles that come with genuine connection. Without the element of sacrifice, love and expression lose their true significance.
In practice
In a wedding speech to emphasize the commitment involved in love.
Love is - OK, it's 20 things, but it isn't 19. And I think that love reaches for something which is very, very deep in us and is very easily obscured, and is also very easily denied, which is the instinct towards the other person, other than toward the self.
A movie camera is like having someone you have a crush on watching you from afar - you pretend it's not there.
I once did a radio program with a famous materialist, that is to say a scientist who believed that absolutely everything was physical and that all emotions were reductive to little electrical impulses in your neurons. And I found that I didn't believe that. But what the emotions really are, I don't have an alternative theory.
One of the reasons why there are so many versions of Chekhov is that translations date in a way that the original doesn't; translations seem to be of their time.
A Chinaman of the T'ang Dynasty—and, by which definition, a philosopher—dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher. Envy him; in his two-fold security.
Chekhov directors and Chekhov actors love working on his plays because there seems to be no end to what you can find out about the micro-narrative when you're investigating a text.
She is so naked and singular. She is the sum of yourself and your dream. Climb her like a monument, step after step. She is solid.
I have so much in me, and the feeling for her absorbs it all; I have so much, and without her it all comes to nothing.
I must be cruel only to be kind; Thus bad begins, and worse remains behind.
The one person who will never leave us, whom we will never lose, is ourself. Learning to love our female selves is where our search for love must begin.
However gross a man may be, the minute he expresses a strong and genuine affection, some inner secretion alters his features, animates his gestures, and colors his voice. The stupidest man will often, under the stress of passion, achieve heights of eloquence, in thought if not in language, and seem to move in some luminous sphere. Goriot's voice and gesture had at this moment the power of communication that characterizes the great actor. Are not our finer feelings the poems of the human will?
Journeys end in lovers meeting; I have spent an all but sleepless night, I have told lies and made a fool of myself, and the very air tastes like wine. I have been frightened half out of my foolish wits, but I have somehow earned this joy; I have been waiting for it for so long.
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