I think you're a wonder. You're beautiful. You're mature. You are, I admit, vastly more experienced than I am. That's what threw me. I was thrown. Forgive me.
Interpretation
The speaker expresses admiration and acknowledgment of someone's beauty and maturity, feeling overwhelmed by their qualities.
In this quote, Philip Roth conveys deep admiration for another person, highlighting their beauty and maturity while also admitting feelings of being overwhelmed by their experience. This vulnerability in admitting one's emotional state and the impact another person can have illustrates the complexities of love and admiration, where one can feel both affection and apprehension simultaneously.
In practice
This quote might be shared during a heartfelt toast at a wedding to express love for the partner.
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.
It is certain that the love of God does not consist in this sweetness and tenderness which we for the most part desire; but rather in serving Him in justice, fortitude, and humility. His Majesty seeks and loves courageous souls.
There is a courtesy of the heart; it is allied to love. From its springs the purest courtesy in the outward behavior.
When once you realize all that it cost God to forgive you, you will be held as in a vice, constrained by the love of God.
And, even yet, I dare not let it languish, Dare not indulge in memory's rapturous pain; Once drinking deep of that divinest anguish, How could I seek the empty world again?
To love our success more than God and our neighbor hardens the heart, making us less able to feel and to sense.
Send Love in Some Form to those you Believe have Wronged you, & Notice How Much Better you Feel
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