Lovers communicate not inside sentences, but between them. Passion lurks within interstice. It is grouting rather than bricks.
Interpretation
Love is expressed in the subtle nuances of communication rather than just words.
This quote emphasizes that true communication between lovers transcends mere words. It highlights the idea that the depth of a romantic relationship is found in the unspoken moments and the feelings that linger in the spaces between words, suggesting that passion and connection are often felt in the subtleties rather than in explicit expressions.
In practice
In a speech at a wedding, one might say, 'As Lionel Shriver puts it, lovers communicate not just with words, but in the spaces between them, highlighting the depth of their connection.'
Yet if there's no reason to live without a child, how could there be with one? To answer one life with a successive life is simply to transfer the onus of purpose to the next generation; the displacements amounts to a cowardly and potentially infinite delay. Your children's answer, presumably, will be to procreate as well, and in doing so to distract themselves, to foist their own aimlessness onto their offspring.
For pity's sake, if you don't take a shine to a novel, there are loads more in the world; read something else. Continue suffering, and it's not the author's fault. It's yours.
In my country, we're sufficiently consumed by the concept of happiness that the right to its pursuit is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. But what is happiness?
You were always uncomfortable with the rhetoric of emotion, which is quite a different matter from discomfort with emotion itself.
In the big picture I write for an audience of people I've never met. By the final draft I'm looking for anything in the prose that's prospectively boring to strangers.
Not that happiness is dull. Only that it doesn't tell well. And of our consuming diversions as we age is to recite, not only to others but to ourselves, our own story.
Love is of all passions the strongest, for it attacks simultaneously the head, the heart and the senses.
My idea of heaven is a great big baked potato and someone to share it with.
Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.
I made your sorrow mine also, that you might have help in bearing it.
Oh, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!
The will of God, to which the law gives expression, is that men should defeat their enemies by loving them.
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