She said the reason that love is so painful is that it always amounts to two people wanting more than two people can give.
Interpretation
Love can be painful because it often leads to unfulfilled expectations.
This quote by Edna O'Brien suggests that love is inherently complicated and often fraught with pain because both individuals in a relationship tend to have desires and expectations that exceed what they can realistically provide to one another. The struggle for emotional fulfillment and connection can lead to feelings of disappointment and heartache when those needs are not met.
In practice
In a speech about the complexities of romantic relationships, one might say, 'As Edna O'Brien noted, love often brings pain due to unmet expectations.'
Love . . . is like nature, but in reverse; first it fruits, then it flowers, then it seems to wither, then it goes deep, deep down into its burrow, where no one sees it, where it is lost from sight, and ultimately people die with that secret buried inside their souls.
That is the mystery about writing: it comes out of afflictions, out of the gouged times, when the heart is cut open.
Cities, in many ways, are the best repositories for a love affair. You are in a forest or a cornfield, you are walking by the seashore, footprint after footprint of trodden sand, and somehow the kiss or the spoken covenant gets lost in the vastness and indifference of nature. In a city there are places to remind us of what has been.
Darkness is drawn to light, but light does not know it; light must absorb the darkness and therefore meet its own extinguishment.
Oh, love, what an unreasoning creature it grew to be.
Recollection is not something that I can summon up, it simply comes and I am the servant of it.
A charity which knows only how to give money is not yet Christian love. You will be free of guilt only when you also give your time, your energy, and your resourcefulness to help end such abuses for good, and when you allow nothing that lies hidden in the storehouse of your Christian religion to remain unused against the cancer that is destroying the vitality of our society in such alarming ways.
Lovers have heartaches _x000D_ That can't be cured by drugs _x000D_ Or sleep, _x000D_ Or games, _x000D_ But only by seeing their beloved.
If it be true that any beautiful thing raises the pure and just desire of man from earth to God, the eternal fount of all, such I believe my love.
The fragility of love is what is most at stake here—humanity's most crucial three-word avowal is often uttered only to find itself suddenly embarrassing or orphaned or isolated or ill-timed—but strangely enough it can work better as a literal or reassuring statement than a transcendent or numinous or ecstatic one.
If one day you have to choose between the world and love, remember this: If you choose the world you’ll be left without love, but if you choose love, with it you will conquer the world
Sometimes it's a form of love just to talk to somebody that you have nothing in common with and still be fascinated by their presence.
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