Love is a kind of dementia with very precise and oft-repeated clinical symptoms. You blush in each other's presence, you both hover in places where you expect the other to pass, you are both a little tongue-tied, you both laugh inexplicably and too long, you become quite nauseatingly girlish, and he becomes quite ridiculously gallant. You have also grown a little stupid.
Interpretation
This quote humorously describes the irrational and whimsical behaviors that are often associated with being in love.
Louis De Bernieres captures the essence of love as a delightful yet irrational state of mind, likening it to a form of dementia where one experiences a series of predictable yet absurd behaviors. The quote highlights how love can make people act differently—blushing, being tongue-tied, and engaging in seemingly silly antics—which can both charm and bewilder those in its thrall.
In practice
During a wedding toast, to highlight the quirky behaviors of the couple.
In deference to such spectacular carnage it is perhaps perverse to dwell upon one person's death, but we are creatures so constituted that the passing of one friend or one acquaintance has a profounder effect that that of 100,000 strangers. If there is any metaphorical truth in the Jewish proverb that he who saves one life saves the whole world, then there is equal metaphorical truth in the proposition that when one person dies, the whole world dies with them.
...but then the general trouble with ignorance is always that the ignorant person has no idea that that's what they are. You can be ignorant and stupid and go through your whole life without ever encountering any evidence against the hypothesis that you're a genius.
When you fall in love, it is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake, and then it subsides. And when it subsides, you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots are become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part.
It was the year they fell into devastating love. Neither one could do anything except think about the other, dream about the other, and wait for letters with the same impatience they felt when they answered them.
Your name is a golden bell hung in my heart. I would break my body to pieces to call you once by your name.
Married love between man and woman is bigger than oaths guarded by right of nature.
I particularly recollect your saying one night, after they had been dining at Netherfield, 'SHE a beauty!--I should as soon call her mother a wit.' But afterwards she seemed to improve on you, and I believe you thought her rather pretty at one time." "Yes," replied Darcy, who could contain himself no longer, "but THAT was only when I first saw her, for it is many months since I have considered her as one of the handsomest women of my acquaintance.
If you love a flower that lives on a star, it is sweet to look at the sky at night. All the stars are a-bloom with flowers.
Love is a horse with a broken leg trying to stand while 45,000 people watch.
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