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.
God mark thee to His grace! Thou was the prettiest babe that e'er I nursed. And might I live to see thee married once, I have my wish.
Beauty, wit,_x000D_ _x000D_ High birth, vigour of bone, desert in service,_x000D_ _x000D_ Love, friendship, charity, are subjects all_x000D_ _x000D_ To envious and calumniating time.
What did my fingers do before they held him? What did my heart do, with its love?
Oh, you who are trying to learn the marvel of Love through the copy book of reason, I'm very much afraid that you will never really see the point.
If Marilyn is in love with my husband it proves she has good taste, for I am in love with him too.
I did not believe him capable of love. That is an emotion in which tenderness is an essential part, but Strickland had no tenderness either for himself or for others; there is in love a sense of weakness, a desire to protect, an eagerness to do good and to give pleasure--if not unselfishness, at all events a selfishness which marvellously conceals itself; it has in it a certain diffidence.
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