Love is a kind of dementia with very precise and oft-repeated clinical symptoms. You blush in each other's presence, you both hover in places where you expect the other to pass, you are both a little tongue-tied, you both laugh inexplicably and too long, you become quite nauseatingly girlish, and he becomes quite ridiculously gallant. You have also grown a little stupid.
Interpretation
This quote humorously describes the irrational and whimsical behaviors that are often associated with being in love.
Louis De Bernieres captures the essence of love as a delightful yet irrational state of mind, likening it to a form of dementia where one experiences a series of predictable yet absurd behaviors. The quote highlights how love can make people act differently—blushing, being tongue-tied, and engaging in seemingly silly antics—which can both charm and bewilder those in its thrall.
In practice
During a wedding toast, to highlight the quirky behaviors of the couple.
In deference to such spectacular carnage it is perhaps perverse to dwell upon one person's death, but we are creatures so constituted that the passing of one friend or one acquaintance has a profounder effect that that of 100,000 strangers. If there is any metaphorical truth in the Jewish proverb that he who saves one life saves the whole world, then there is equal metaphorical truth in the proposition that when one person dies, the whole world dies with them.
...but then the general trouble with ignorance is always that the ignorant person has no idea that that's what they are. You can be ignorant and stupid and go through your whole life without ever encountering any evidence against the hypothesis that you're a genius.
When you fall in love, it is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake, and then it subsides. And when it subsides, you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots are become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part.
Love cures people - both the ones who give it and the ones who receive it.
There is no shame in loving. If your septons say there is, your seven gods must be demons. In the isles we know better. Our gods gave us legs to run with, noses to smell with, hands to touch and feel. What mad cruel god would give a man eyes and tell him he must forever keep them shut, and never look at all the beauty in the world? Only a monster god, a demon of the darkness.
I need more than anything right now what is, of course, most impossible, someone to love me, to be with me at night when I wake up in shuddering horror and fear of the cement tunnels leading down to the shock room, to comfort me with an assurance that no psychiatrist can quite manage to convey.
If you enter this world knowing you are loved and you leave this world knowing the same, then everything that happens in between can be dealt with.
I wish I was either in your arms full of faith, or that a Thunder bolt would strike me.
Love said to me, there is nothing that is not me. Be silent.
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