You were always uncomfortable with the rhetoric of emotion, which is quite a different matter from discomfort with emotion itself.
Interpretation
The quote distinguishes between being uncomfortable with emotional expressions and the emotions themselves.
Lionel Shriver's quote highlights a nuanced understanding of emotions and their communication. It suggests that while some individuals may find expressing emotions through rhetoric or language to be uncomfortable, it doesn't necessarily mean they are averse to feeling those emotions deeply. This distinction emphasizes the complexity of human emotional experiences—showing that discomfort may arise from the way emotions are conveyed rather than the feelings themselves.
In practice
This quote can be used in a psychology seminar to discuss emotional intelligence.
Yet if there's no reason to live without a child, how could there be with one? To answer one life with a successive life is simply to transfer the onus of purpose to the next generation; the displacements amounts to a cowardly and potentially infinite delay. Your children's answer, presumably, will be to procreate as well, and in doing so to distract themselves, to foist their own aimlessness onto their offspring.
For pity's sake, if you don't take a shine to a novel, there are loads more in the world; read something else. Continue suffering, and it's not the author's fault. It's yours.
In my country, we're sufficiently consumed by the concept of happiness that the right to its pursuit is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. But what is happiness?
In the big picture I write for an audience of people I've never met. By the final draft I'm looking for anything in the prose that's prospectively boring to strangers.
Not that happiness is dull. Only that it doesn't tell well. And of our consuming diversions as we age is to recite, not only to others but to ourselves, our own story.
Children live in the same world we do. To kid ourselves that we can shelter them from it isn't just naive it's a vanity.
Religion is the life of India, religion is the language of this country, the symbol of all its movements.
Actual life was chaos, but there was something terribly logical in the imagination. It was the imagination that set remorse to dog the feet of sin. It was the imagination that made each crime bear its misshapen brood. In the common world of fact the wicked were not punished, nor the good rewarded. Success was given to the strong, failure thrust upon the weak. That was all.
We must suffer to the end, to the moment when we stop believing in suffering.
The myth of integration as propounded under the banner of the liberal ideology must be cracked because it makes people believe that something is being achieved when in reality the artificially integrated circles are a soporfic to the blacks while salving the consciences of the few guilt-stricken whites.
The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever.
The Establishment Clause prohibits government from making adherence to a religion relevant in any way to a person's standing in the political community.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.