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.
Love is the hardest lesson in Christianity; but, for that reason, it should be most our care to learn it.
Venus, when her son was lost,_x000D_ _x000D_ Cried him up and down the coast,_x000D_ _x000D_ In hamlets, palaces, and parks,_x000D_ _x000D_ And told the truant by his marks,-_x000D_ _x000D_ Golden curls, and quiver, and bow.
The heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good.
And the story of love is a long sad tale ending in graves.
Ten kisses short as one, one long as twenty.
Separated lovers cheat absence by a thousand fancies which have their own reality. They are prevented from seeing one another and they cannot write; nevertheless they find countless mysterious ways of corresponding, by sending each other the song of birds, the scent of flowers, the laughter of children.
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