The war had made a man of him! It had coarsened him and hardened him. There was no other way to look at it. It had made him reach a point at which he would no longer stand unbearable things.
Ford Madox FordRead
There is no man who loves a woman that does not desire to come to her for the renewal of his courage, for the cutting asunder of his difficulties. And that will be the mainspring of his desire for her. We are all so afraid, we are all so alone, we all so need from the outside the assurance of our own worthiness to exist.
Interpretation
Love provides strength and assurance in times of fear and loneliness.
This quote by Ford Madox Ford highlights the profound connection between love and personal resilience. It suggests that genuine love is not just about romantic affection; it plays a vital role in renewing one's spirit and providing comfort amidst life's challenges. The need for reassurance and validation from a loved one speaks to our inherent vulnerabilities and the human desire for connection.
In practice
A speaker at a wedding could use this quote to emphasize the supportive nature of love.
The war had made a man of him! It had coarsened him and hardened him. There was no other way to look at it. It had made him reach a point at which he would no longer stand unbearable things.
Mind, I am not preaching anything contrary to accepted morality. I am not advocating free love in this or any other case. Society must go on, I suppose, and society can only exist if the normal, if the virtuous, and the slightly deceitful flourish, and if the passionate, the headstrong, and the too-truthful are condemned to suicide and madness.
You have to wait together - for a week, for a year, for a lifetime, before the final intimate conversation may be attained ... and exhausted. So that ... That in effect was love.
Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you.
It is not merely that people must die and people must suffer, if not here, then there. But what is dreadful is that the world goes on and people go on being stupidly cruel - in the old ways and all the time.
The first thing you have to consider when writing a novel is your story, and then your story - and then your story!
The affair between Margot Asquith and Margot Asquith will live as one of the prettiest love stories in all literature.
Love is reducing the universe to one being.
Your eyes in which I travel Have given to signs along the roads A meaning alien to the earth.
Passion is the energy that love creates with no object other than itself.
I felt like a seed in a pomegranate. Some say that the pomegranate was the real apple of Eve, fruit of the womb, I would eat my way into perdition to taste you.
My father had not been outside the house except to drive back and forth to work or sit out in the backyard, for months, nor had he seen his neighbors. Now he looked at them, from face to face, until he realized I had been loved by people he didn't even recognize. His heart filled up, warm again as it had not been in what seemed so long to him- save small forgotten moments with Buckley, the accidents of love that happened with his son. ~pgs 209-210; Buckley, Lindsey and Jack on Susie
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