And enough for me that when my hand touched your shoulder, you leaned on me; and when you felt me slip away, you called my name.
For children love is a feeling; for adults, it is a decision. Children wait to learn if their love is true by seeing how long it lasts; adults make their love true by never wavering from their commitment.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Children experience love as an emotion, while adults view it as a commitment involving conscious choices.
This quote by Orson Scott Card contrasts the nature of love as perceived by children and adults. Children often understand love as a fleeting feeling, dependent on circumstances and how long someone can maintain that affection. In contrast, adults recognize that love involves deeper commitment and effort, choosing to remain devoted to their partner regardless of challenges, thereby making their love last through conscious decisions rather than passive experiences.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a relationship workshop to illustrate different perspectives on love.
More from Orson Scott Card
All quotes →The world is always a democracy in times of flux, and the man with the best voice will win.
Never mind that the story had turned out to be lies and foolishness—there was always folks stupid enough to say, Where there's smoke there's fire, when the saying should have been, Where there's scandalous lies there's always malicious believers and spreaders-around, regardless of evidence.
The lives of all people flow through time, and, regardless of how brutal one moment may be, how filled with grief or pain or fear, time flows through all lives equally.
You take a step, then another. That's the journey. But to take a step with your eyes open is not a journey at all, it's a remaking of your own mind.
I've had your tears with mine, and you've had mine with yours. I think that's more intimate even than a kiss.
Similar quotes
Why don't you ever use your strength on me?" she said. Because love means renouncing strength," said Franz softly.
My heart born naked was swaddled in lullabies. Later alone it wore poems for clothes. Like a shirt I carried on my back the poetry I had read. So I lived for half a century until wordlessly we met. From my shirt on the back of the chair I learn tonight how many years of learning by heart I waited for you.
The ecstatic insanity of romantic pursuit can be so enhanced by music that entire romantic conquests, victories and ruinous, crushing defeats can be tied to songs to such a degree that it's almost unbearable to listen to them again, as they bring back the memories so vividly.
I love the silent hour of night, for blissful dreams may then arise, revealing to my charmed sight what may not bless my waking eyes.
He who wants to do good knocks at the gate: he who loves finds the door open.
A charity which knows only how to give money is not yet Christian love. You will be free of guilt only when you also give your time, your energy, and your resourcefulness to help end such abuses for good, and when you allow nothing that lies hidden in the storehouse of your Christian religion to remain unused against the cancer that is destroying the vitality of our society in such alarming ways.