Perhaps love is a minor madness. And as with madness, it's unendurable alone. The one person who can relieve us is of course the sole person we cannot go to: the one we love. So instead we seek out allies, even among strangers and wives, fellow patients who, if they can't touch the edge of our particular sorrow, have felt something that cuts nearly as deep.
Interpretation
Love can feel like a kind of madness that is difficult to endure alone, leading us to seek connection with others.
In this quote, Andrew Sean Greer explores the profound complexity of love and its impact on our emotional state. He suggests that love can drive us to a state of 'minor madness,' making it unbearable to experience alone. Despite our desire to turn to the person we love for relief, this often feels impossible, leading us instead to seek comfort from others who share our experiences of sorrow, even if they cannot fully understand our specific pain. This highlights the universal need for companionship and understanding in the face of emotional turmoil.
In practice
During a speech about the importance of emotional support in relationships, this quote beautifully captures the essence of seeking companionship.
A lover exists only in fragments, a dozen or so if the romance is new, a thousand if we're married to him, and out of those fragments our heart constructs an entire person. What we each create, since whatever is missing is filled by our imagination, is the person we wish him to be. The less we know him, of course, the more we love him. And that's why we always remember that first rapturous night when he was a stranger, and why this rapture returns only when he's dead.
No one would have known, from how he held my hand, [that] over the years of heartache he had hatched a plot to change my life forever. He held his grip and would not let me go. I do not know what joins the parts of an atom, but it seems what binds one human to another is pain.
Some things are so impossible, so fantastic, that when they happen, you are not at all surprised. Their sheer impossibility has made you imagine them too many times in your head, and when you find yourself on that longed-for moonlit path, it seems unreal but still, somehow, familiar. You dreamed of it, of course; you know it like a memory.
We are each the love of someone's life.
...for, however all other feelings may be withered in a woman's nature, there is always one bright smiling spot in the maternal breast, and that is where a dearly-beloved child is concerned.
The proof of true love is to be unsparing in criticism.
Your love to me was like an unread book.
I fell in love with the thought that a human life could be a priestly conduit, a connecting link between earth and sky. As I grew and stumbled and, most important, as I began to love and be loved, I realized that the ultimate priest is the lover inside us
I think, am sure, a brother's love exceeds_x000D_ _x000D_ All the world's loves in its unworldliness.
It's possible to love a human being if you don't know them too well.
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