[T]o love a specific person, and to identify with his or her struggles and joys as if they were your own, you have to surrender some of your self.
Interpretation
True love involves selflessness and empathy for another person's experiences.
This quote by Jonathan Franzen emphasizes that to genuinely love someone, it requires a deep level of emotional commitment where you become invested in their experiences. Such love is not just about supporting the other person but also entails relinquishing some of your individuality and personal desires to truly understand and share in their struggles and joys.
In practice
During a wedding toast to highlight the importance of empathy in their relationship.
Every good writer I know needs to go into some deep, quiet place to do work that is fully imagined. And what the Internet brings is lots of vulgar data. It is the antithesis of the imagination. It leaves nothing to the imagination.
The problem was money and the indignities of life without it. Every stroller, cell phone, Yankees cap, and SUV he saw was a torment. He wasn't covetous, he wasn't envious. But without money he was hardly a man.
Each new thing he encountered in life impelled him in a direction that fully convinced him of its rightness, but then the next new thing loomed up and impelled him in the opposite direction, which also felt right. There was no controlling narrative: he seemed to himself a purely reactive pinball in a game whose only object was to stay alive for staying alive's sake.
If multiculturalism succeeds in making us a nation of independently empowered tribes, each tribe will be deprived of the comfort of victimhood and be forced to confront human limitation for what it is: a fixture of life.
To read is to have experiences; every book changes my life at least a little bit. The first time I can remember this happening was when I was 10, with a biography of Thomas Edison.
Good novels are produced by people who voluntarily isolate themselves and go deep, and report from the depths on what they find.
Erotic play discloses a nameless world which is revealed by the nocturnal language of lovers. Such language is not written down. It is whispered into the ear at night in a hoarse voice. At dawn it is forgotten.
The betrothed and accepted lover has lost the wildest charms of his maiden by her acceptance. She was heaven while he pursued her, but she cannot be heaven if she stoops to one such as he!
You left and I cried tears of blood. My sorrow grows. Its not just that You left. But when You left my eyes went with You. Now, how will I cry?
Godlike the man who_x000D_ sits at her side, who_x000D_ watches and catches_x000D_ that laughter_x000D_ which (softly) tears me_x000D_ to tatters: nothing is left of me, each time_x000D_ I see her.
For those who love, nothing is too difficult, especially when it is done for the love of our Lord Jesus Christ.
People who are obsessed with Jesus do not consider service a burden. Obsessed people take joy in loving God by loving His people (Mt 13:44)(Jn 15:8).
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