Trust your heart if the seas catch fire, live by love though the stars walk backward.
E. E. CummingsRead
He thinks about her, at this moment, in her house, a few thin walls away, packing her life into boxes and bags and he wonders what memories she is rediscovering, what thoughts are catching in her mouth like the dust blown from unused textbooks. He wonders if she has buried any traces of herself under her floorboards. He wonders what those traces would be if she had. And he wonders again why he thinks about her so much when he knows so little to think about.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote reflects deep contemplation about a loved one and the memories tied to her belongings.
In this quote, Jon McGregor captures the essence of longing and the connection we have to people through their physical belongings and memories. The protagonist reflects on a woman packing her life while questioning his own thoughts and emotions, revealing a mix of nostalgia, curiosity, and yearning. It illustrates how deeply intertwined our identities are with our possessions and the memories they hold, provoking introspection about love and emotional connections.
Themes
LoveMemoriesLongingConnectionIntrospection
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be shared during a reflective moment with friends about past relationships.
Similar quotes
If he were less well trained, and less careful, he would say hate. But he can’t say it; it is too close to passion, and passion is too close to love, and love is amor deliria nervosa, the deadliest of all deadly things: It is the reason for the games of pretend, for the secret selves, for the spasms in the throat.
Lauren OliverRead
The bottom line is that (a) people are never perfect, but love can be, (b) that is the one and only way that the mediocre and the vile can be transformed, and (c) doing that makes it that. Loving makes love. Loving makes itself. We waste time looking for the perfect lover instead of creating the perfect love. Wouldn't that be the way to make love stay?
Tom RobbinsRead
Sometimes I have the strangest feeling about you. Especially when you are near me as you are now. It feels as though I had a string tied here under my left rib where my heart is, tightly knotted to you in a similar fashion. And when you go to Ireland, with all that distance between us, I am afraid that this cord will be snapped, and I shall bleed inwardly.
Charlotte BronteRead
The only perfect love to be found on earth is not sexual love, which is riddled with hostility and insecurity, but the wordless commitment of families, which takes as its model mother-love. This is not to say that fathers have no place, for father-love, with its driving for self-improvement and discipline, is also essential to survival, but that uncorrected father-love, father-love as it were practiced by both parents, is a way to annihilation.
Germaine GreerRead
There is nothing more lovely in life than the union of two people whose love for one another has grown through the years, from the small acorn of passion, into a great rooted tree
Vita Sackville-WestRead