If I said I was madly in love with you, I'd be lying and what's more, you'd know it.
Margaret MitchellRead
All really nice girls wonder when men don't try to kiss them. They know they shouldn't want them to and they know they must act insulted if they do, but just the same, they wish the men would try.
Interpretation
This quote reflects the complex emotions women experience regarding romantic advances from men.
Margaret Mitchell highlights the paradoxical feelings many women face when it comes to men making advances. While societal expectations dictate that women should be offended by overt attempts, there is an underlying desire for affection and validation, suggesting that these conflicting emotions can often create tension in romantic interactions.
In practice
In a discussion about romantic relationships during a women's retreat.
If I said I was madly in love with you, I'd be lying and what's more, you'd know it.
You're like the thief who isn't the least bit sorry he stole, but is terribly, terribly sorry he's going to jail. - Rhett Butler
It's a curse - this not wanting to look on naked realities. Until the war, life was never more real to me than a shadow show on a curtain. And I preferred it so. I do not like the outlines of things to be too sharp. I like them gently blurred, a little hazy.
Well, my dear, take heart. Some day, I will kiss you and you will like it. But not now, so I beg you not to be too impatient.
men are so conceited they’ll believe anything that flatters them
Oh, why was he so handsomely blond, so courteously aloof, so maddeningly boring with his talk about Europe and books and music and poetry and things that interested her not at all - and yet so desirable?
And he would listen, making only a few comments, always sympathetic, so that when I left him I had the distinct impression he had solved everything for me.
Even though people may be well known, they hold in their hearts the emotions of a simple person for the moments that are the most important of those we know on earth: birth, marriage and death.
Marriage must incessantly contend with a monster that devours everything: familiarity.
She saw herself riding in the passenger seat, Sam behind the wheel. Like two of those little peg people in a toy car. Husband peg, wife peg, side by side. Facing the road and not looking at each other; for why would they need to, really, having gone beyond the visible surface long ago. No hope of admiring gazes anymore, no chance of unremitting adoration. Nothing left to show but their plain, true, homely, interior selves, which were actually much richer anyhow.
More than half of the complaints that patients bring to their doctors are emotional in origin. Most often, they include troubled or absent connections with loved ones.
And yet, standing behind her son, waiting for the traffic light change, she remembered how in the midst of it all there had been a time when she'd felt a loneliness so deep that once, not so many years ago, having a cavity filled, the dentist's gentle turning of her chin with his soft fingers had felt to her like a tender kindness of almost excruciating depth, and she had swallowed with a groan of longing, tears springing to her eyes.
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