Don't we forgive everything of a lover? We forgive selfishness, desire, guile. As long as we are the motive for it...There are some European words you can never translate properly into another language.
Interpretation
In love, we often overlook our partner's flaws and selfishness as long as they desire us.
This quote highlights the unconditional nature of love, suggesting that when we are the object of a lover's affection, we tend to forgive their shortcomings and selfish behaviors. It points to the deep emotional connection that can allow individuals to overlook negative traits if the love is genuine, even hinting at the complexity of love and the challenges of translation between cultures, where profound feelings may not be easily conveyed.
In practice
During a Valentine's Day speech about the complexities of love and forgiveness.
When we are young we do not look into mirrors. It is when we are old, concerned with our name, our legend, what our lives will mean to the future. We become vain with the names we own, our claims to have been the first eyes, the strongest army, the cleverest merchant. It is when he is old that Narcissus wants a graven image of himself.
Water is the exile, carried back in cans and flasks, the ghost between your hands and your mouth.
You must talk to me, Caravaggio. Or am I just a book? Something to be read, some creature to be tempted out of a loch and shot full of morphine, full of corridors, lies, loose vegetation, pockets of stones.
You don't want to write your own opinion, you don't want to just represent yourself, but represent yourself through someone else.
A man in a desert can hold absence in his cupped hands, knowing it is something that feeds him more than water.
I have spent weeks in the desert, forgetting to look at the moon, he says, as a married man may spend days never looking into the face of his wife. These are not sins of omission but signs of pre-occuopation.
No man has ever lived that had enough of children's gratitude or woman's love.
To return to love, to get the love we always wanted but never had, to have the love we want but are not prepared to give, we seek romantic relationships. We believe these relationships, more than any other, will rescue and redeem us. True love does have the power to redeem but only if we are ready for redemption. Love saves us only if we want to be saved.
So I took her hand, and I don't know what everybody else heard, but to me it sounded like a slow dance: a little sad, but maybe a little hopeful, too.
Life with you was lovely—and when I say lovely, I mean doves and lilies, and velvet, and that soft pink ‘v’ in the middle and the way your tongue curved up to the long, lingering ‘l.’ Our life together was alliterative, and when I think of all the little things which will die, now that we cannot share them, I feel as if we were dead too.
There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.
I can't bear to think of life without Janice. I want to go first because I don't want to miss her, because that would be a pain far worse than any death.
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