Because that is when you love somebody - when you see them being game in the face of the worst. Not courageous. Not heroic. Just game.
Interpretation
Loving someone means appreciating their resilience during tough times.
This quote by Philip Roth emphasizes that true love is shown when someone supports and admires another person's ability to face difficult challenges. It suggests that love is about being there for someone and recognizing their strength, not necessarily expecting grand acts of bravery or heroism, but rather a steadfastness and willingness to engage with life’s hardships.
In practice
During a speech at a wedding, one might say, 'True love is evident when you see your partner being game in the face of adversity.'
American society [...] not only sanctions gross and unfair relations among men, but it encourages them. Now, can that be denied? No. Rivalry, competition, envy, jealousy, all that is malignant in human character is nourished by the system. Possession, money, property--on such corrupt standards as these do you people measure happiness and success.
I have a slogan I use when I get anxious writing, which happens quite a bit: ‘the ordeal is part of the commitment.’ It’s one of my mantras. It makes a lot of things doable.
Everybody who flashed the signs of loyalty he took to be loyal. Everybody who flashed the signs of intelligence he took to be intelligent. And so he had failed to see into his daughter, failed to see into his wife, failed to see into his one and only mistress—probably had never even begun to see into himself
When you publish a book, it's the world's book. The world edits it.
It isn't that you subordinate your ideas to the force of the facts in autobiography but that you construct a sequence of stories to bind up the facts with a persuasive hypothesis that unravels your history's meaning.
That's what you're looking for as a writer when you're working. You're looking for your own freedom. To lose your inhibition to delve deep into your memory and experiences and life and then to find the prose that will persuade the reader.
I know people who've gone to jail. It don't mean you stop loving them! They deservin' love just as much in there, and maybe they needin' it more.
The romantics would call this a love story, the cynics would call it a tragedy. In my mind it’s a little bit of both, and no matter how you choose to view it in the end, it does not change the fact that it involves a great deal of my life and the path I’ve chosen to follow.
Gamble everything for love, if you're a true human being.
Happiness is holding someone in your arms and knowing you hold the whole world.
Love is a time-honored way to transcend the separate-self sense and leap into the sublime; Treya and I held hands, closed our eyes, and jumped.
But you were something more than young and sweet And fair, - and the long year remembers you.
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