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 there, in particular, that I confirmed the truth that love, which we cry up as the source of our pleasures, is nothing more than an excuse for them.
If I take offence easily; if I am content to continue in cold unfriendliness, though friendship be possible, then I know nothing of Calvary love.
I opened the window and my heart. The sun flooded my house and Love flooded my soul.
Love is insistent on its own continuation. Every fraction of a second, someone somewhere falls in love, a former enemy becomes a friend, and a newborn baby is born into the world.
When I clamber to the heights of sleep, Or when I grow excited with wine, suddenly I meet your face.
If you are silent, be silent out of love. If you speak, speak out of love.
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