Real love is always chaotic. You lose control; you lose perspective. You lose the ability to protect yourself. The greater the love, the greater the chaos. It’s a given and that’s the secret.
Interpretation
Real love can be overwhelming and chaotic, affecting one's sense of control and safety.
This quote by Jonathan Carroll emphasizes the intense and often tumultuous nature of true love. It suggests that real love involves a deep emotional entanglement that can lead to losing control and perspective, indicating that the intensity of love is often accompanied by an equally intense sense of chaos and uncertainty. The mention of chaos as a 'given' reflects the idea that such experiences are an inherent part of loving deeply.
In practice
In a speech on relationships, to illustrate the often complicated nature of love.
Part of life is a quest to find that one essential person who will understand our story. But we choose wrongly so often. Over the ensuing years that person we thought understood us best ends up regarding us with pity, indifference, or active dislike. Those who truly care can be divided into two categories: those who understand us, and those who forgive our worst sins. Rarely do we find someone capable of both.
Dogs are minor angels, and I don't mean that facetiously. They love unconditionally , forgive immediately, are the truest of friends, willing to do anything that makes us happy
I have never heard anyone say This is it. I know right now is the high point of my life. It will never get any better. Only in retrospect do we recognize the best times and of course then it is too late.
When you love someone deeply, you know secrets they haven't told you yet. Or secrets they aren't even aware of themselves. ... She was also the person I wanted to share the trivia of my life with, because that too is part of the magic of concern: Whatever you live is important to them and they will help you through it.
It took me less than half a lifetime to realize that regret is one of the few guaranteed certainties. Sooner or later everything is touched by it, despite our naive and senseless hope that just this time we will be spared its cold hand on our heart.
Writing a short story is like having a short intense affair, whereas writing a novel is like a long rich marriage.
The affair between Margot Asquith and Margot Asquith will live as one of the prettiest love stories in all literature.
The problem with idealizing love is that it causes us to develop unrealistic expectations about what love actually is and what it can do for us.
Smiles from reason flow, To brute deny'd, and are of love the food.
That best portion of a man's life, his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and love.
But till we are built like angels, with hammer and chisel and pen, we will work for ourself and a woman, forever and ever, Amen.
Every one of us is more beloved than we can possibly understand or imagine. Let us therefore be kinder to one another and kinder to ourselves.
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