His face contained for me all possibilities of fierceness and sweetness, pride and submissiveness, violence, self-containment. I never saw more in it than I had when I saw it first, because I saw everything then. The whole thing in him that I was going to love, and never catch or explain.
Interpretation
The quote reflects the complexity of love, showing how it encompasses both strength and vulnerability.
Alice Munro's quote illustrates the multifaceted nature of love and attraction. It reveals how our first impressions can encapsulate a broad spectrum of emotions and characteristics in a person, blending fierce qualities with gentle ones, pride with humility. This complexity can be overwhelming, leading to a deep affection that is difficult to define or grasp fully, highlighting the mysterious and profound aspects of romantic feelings.
In practice
This quote can be used during a wedding speech to express the complexity of human relationships.
Sometimes our connection is frayed, it is in danger, it seems almost lost. Views and streets deny knowledge of us, the air grows thin. Wouldn't we rather have a destiny to submit to, than, something that claims us, anything, instead of such flimsy choices, arbitrary days?
I was amazed as people must be who are seized and kidnapped, and who realize that in the strange world of their captors they have a value absolutely unconnected with anything they know about themselves.
Anecdotes don't make good stories. Generally I dig down underneath them so far that the story that finally comes out is not what people thought their anecdotes were about.
I just believed it easily, the way you might believe and in fact remember that you once had another set of teeth, now vanished but real in spite of that. Until one day, one day when I may even have been in my teens, I knew with a dim sort of hole in my insides that now I didn't believe it anymore.
You want in all cases for the story to get through the writing.
A story is not like a road to follow... it's more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside it altered by being viewed from these windows.
When I sing, I feel like when you're first in love. It's more than sex. It's that point two people can get to they call love, when you really touch someone for the first time, but it's gigantic, multiplied by the whole audience. I feel chills.
Types really don't matter. I have been accused of preferring blondes. But I have known some mighty attractive redheads, brunettes, and yes, women with grey hair. Age, height, weight haven't anything to do with glamour.
Let us also love our neighbors as ourselves. Let us have charity and humility. Let us give alms because these cleanse our souls from the stains of sin. Men lose all the material things they leave behind them in this world, but they carry with them the reward of their charity and the alms they give. For these they will receive from the Lord the reward and recompense they deserve.
You can't reason with your heart; it has its own laws, and thumps about things which the intellect scorns.
Now I can see how that can happen. You can fall in love with anybody--a fool, a criminal, a nothing. There are no good rules.
to love is to risk, not being loved in return. to hope is to risk pain. to try is to risk failure. but risk must be taken because the greatest hazard in my life is to risk nothing.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.