The discovery that heartbreak is indeed heartbreaking consoles us about our humanity.
Interpretation
Understanding heartbreak connects us to our shared human experience.
This quote emphasizes that experiencing heartbreak is a painful yet universal aspect of being human. Acknowledging this shared suffering can provide comfort, as it reminds us that we are not alone in our emotional struggles, highlighting the depth of our humanity.
In practice
In a speech on mental health, this quote could be used to highlight the significance of discussing emotional pain.
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?
You were always uncomfortable with the rhetoric of emotion, which is quite a different matter from discomfort with emotion itself.
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.
Her only gift was knowing people almost by instinct, she thought, walking on. If you put her in a room with someone, up went her back like a cat's; or she purred.
Where such men love they have no desire and where they desire they cannot love
Being popular comes when you have everything. But to be liked, it means that you must be treating people with respect and you must be showing kindness toward them.
We do know that no one gets wise enough to really understand the heart of another, though it is the task of our life to try.
Why do people have to be this lonely? What's the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?
The less you demand total fulfillment from relationships, the more you can appreciate them for the beautiful tapestries they are, in which absolute and relative, perfect and imperfect, infinite and finite are marvelously interwoven. You can stop fighting the shifting tides of relative love and learn to ride them instead. And you come to appreciate more fully the simple, ordinary heroism involved in opening to another person and forging real intimacy.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.