To love one child and to love all children, whether living or dead -somewhere these two loves come together. To love a no-good but humble punk and to love an honest man who believes himself to be an honest man -somewhere these, too, come together.
Interpretation
True love encompasses both individual connections and universal compassion.
In this quote, Marguerite Duras reveals the depth and breadth of love, suggesting that it transcends individual relationships and extends to all humanity. She emphasizes that the love we hold for a single child, regardless of their flaws or circumstances, parallels the love we can feel for all children and for individuals who may not fit societal norms. This interconnectedness of love highlights its complex and all-encompassing nature.
In practice
During a speech about the importance of empathy in education.
Alcohol doesn't console, it doesn't fill up anyone's psychological gaps, all it replaces is the lack of God. It doesn't comfort man. On the contrary, it encourages him in his folly, it transports him to the supreme regions where he is master of his own destiny.
What she said was always strange. It had happened long ago. It seemed insignificant. And yet it was something you remembered forever. The words as well as the story. The voice as much as the words.
I'm still there, watching those possessed children, as far away from the mystery now as I was then. I've never written, though I thought I wrote, never loved, though I thought I loved, never done anything but wait outside the closed door.
Perhaps someone will have seen mine, the one I’m waiting for, just as I saw him, in a ditch when his hands were making their last appeal and his eyes no longer could see. Someone who will never know what that man was to me; someone whose name I’ll never know.
Stormy skies, says Ernesto. He grieved for them. Summer rain. Childhood.
A prolonged silence ensues. The reason for the silence is our growing interest one for the other. No one is aware of it, no one yet; no one? am I quite sure?
...once I falsely hoped to meet the beings who, pardoning my outward form, would love me for the excellent qualities which I was capable of unfolding.
You are a fountain of the sun's light. I am a willow shadow on the ground. You make my raggedness silky.
Only when you are lost can love find itself in you without losing its way.
Their silence comfortable. Something unfolding. But what? Not love, which wrenched and wounded. Not love, which came only once.
Love is like ice in the hands of children.
I wanted to tell her that being loved is a talent too, that it takes as much guts and as much work as loving; that some people, for whatever reason, never learn the knack
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