The trouble is, I can't find a part of myself where you're not important. I write in order to be worth your while and to finance the way I want to live with you. Not the way you want to live. The way I want to live with you. Without you I wouldn't care. I'd eat tinned spaghetti and put on yesterday's clothes. But as it is I change my socks, and make money, and tart up Brodie's unspeakable drivel into speakable drivel so he can be an author too, like me.
Interpretation
The quote reflects the deep importance of a beloved person in the speaker's life and how love motivates their actions and aspirations.
In this quote, Tom Stoppard articulates the profound impact that a significant other has on one’s identity and motivation. The speaker expresses that their love for this person drives them to strive for a better life, highlighting the idea that passion and relationships can transform mundane existence into something meaningful. The mundane act of living is elevated by the presence of love, showing that true fulfillment comes from the connections we maintain with those we cherish, rather than the superficial trappings of success or wealth.
In practice
In a romantic relationship discussion, one might use this quote to emphasize the importance of love in driving personal ambitions.
Love is - OK, it's 20 things, but it isn't 19. And I think that love reaches for something which is very, very deep in us and is very easily obscured, and is also very easily denied, which is the instinct towards the other person, other than toward the self.
A movie camera is like having someone you have a crush on watching you from afar - you pretend it's not there.
I once did a radio program with a famous materialist, that is to say a scientist who believed that absolutely everything was physical and that all emotions were reductive to little electrical impulses in your neurons. And I found that I didn't believe that. But what the emotions really are, I don't have an alternative theory.
One of the reasons why there are so many versions of Chekhov is that translations date in a way that the original doesn't; translations seem to be of their time.
A Chinaman of the T'ang Dynasty—and, by which definition, a philosopher—dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher. Envy him; in his two-fold security.
Chekhov directors and Chekhov actors love working on his plays because there seems to be no end to what you can find out about the micro-narrative when you're investigating a text.
Failing to find in women exactly the same kind of sexual emotions, as they find in themselves, men have concluded that there are none there at all.
To see queer people keeping each other down makes me so sad because I've been around for a long time - I've seen the people who came before us fight for what we have right now, and they did not fight like that for us to go backwards.
In marriage you are not sacrificing yourself to the other person. You are sacrificing yourself to the relationship.
It is a great misfortune to be alone, my friends; and it must be believed that solitude can quickly destroy reason.
Those who say they will forgive but can't forget, simply bury the hatchet but leave the handle out for immediate use.
What holds the world together, as I have learned from bitter experience, is sexual intercourse.
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