A lover exists only in fragments, a dozen or so if the romance is new, a thousand if we're married to him, and out of those fragments our heart constructs an entire person. What we each create, since whatever is missing is filled by our imagination, is the person we wish him to be. The less we know him, of course, the more we love him. And that's why we always remember that first rapturous night when he was a stranger, and why this rapture returns only when he's dead.
Interpretation
This quote reflects how love constructs an image of a person from incomplete knowledge, filled in by our imagination.
Andrew Sean Greer's quote delves into the nature of love and how it is often built on fragmented understandings of a partner. The idea that we fill in the gaps of our loved one's personality with our imagination suggests that our perception is heavily influenced by our desires and emotions. This phenomenon is especially strong in the early stages of a relationship, where mystery and unknown aspects heighten romantic feelings. As we get to know someone more deeply, the illusion can fade, but the intense desire often resurfaces in memories or loss, showcasing the complexity of love and attachment.
In practice
This quote could be used in a wedding speech to highlight the magic of new love.
Perhaps love is a minor madness. And as with madness, it's unendurable alone. The one person who can relieve us is of course the sole person we cannot go to: the one we love. So instead we seek out allies, even among strangers and wives, fellow patients who, if they can't touch the edge of our particular sorrow, have felt something that cuts nearly as deep.
No one would have known, from how he held my hand, [that] over the years of heartache he had hatched a plot to change my life forever. He held his grip and would not let me go. I do not know what joins the parts of an atom, but it seems what binds one human to another is pain.
Some things are so impossible, so fantastic, that when they happen, you are not at all surprised. Their sheer impossibility has made you imagine them too many times in your head, and when you find yourself on that longed-for moonlit path, it seems unreal but still, somehow, familiar. You dreamed of it, of course; you know it like a memory.
We are each the love of someone's life.
Your hope in my heart is the rarest treasure _x000D_ _x000D_ Your Name on my tongue is the sweetest word_x000D_ _x000D_ My choicest hours_x000D_ _x000D_ Are the hours I spend with You -_x000D_ _x000D_ O God, I can't live in this world_x000D_ _x000D_ Without remembering You
My affection hath an unknown bottom, like the Bay of Portugal.
She is standing on my lids And her hair is in my hair She has the colour of my eye She has the body of my hand In my shade she is engulfed As a stone against the sky She will never close her eyes And she does not let me sleep And her dreams in the bright day Make the suns evaporate And me laugh cry and laugh Speak when I have nothing to say
There is a tremendous relief in knowing that {God's} love to me is utterly realistic, based at every point on prior knowledge of the worst about me, so that no discovery now can disillusion Him about me, in the way I am so often disillusioned about myself, and quench His determination to bless me.
Peace before everything, God before anything,_x000D_ _x000D_ Love before anything, real before everything,_x000D_ _x000D_ Home before any place, shoot before anything,_x000D_ _x000D_ Style and state radiate, Love Power slay the hate.
I am not ashamed to say that no man I ever met was my father's equal, and I never loved any other man as much.
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