This is where I keep a whole lot of stuff that I’ve written. You're welcome to read it if you like, but please don’t feel obliged.
If you refresh the page you should see a new (random) quote.
It would be absurd to say that Lear is lacking Affection. In so far as Affection is Need-love he is half-crazy with it. Unless, in his own way, he loved his daughters he would not so desperately desire their love. The most unlovable parent (or child) may be full of such ravenous love. But it works to their own misery and everyone else’s. The situation becomes suffocating. If people are already unlovable a continual demand on their part (as of right) to be loved—their manifest sense of injury, their reproaches, whether loud and clamorous or merely implicit in every look and gesture of resentful self-pity—produce in us a sense of guilt (they are intended to do so) for a fault we could not have avoided and cannot cease to commit. They seal up the very fountain for which they are thirsty. If ever, at some favoured moment, any germ of Affection for them stirs in us, their demand for more and still more petrifies us again. And of course such people always desire the same proof of our love; we are to join their side, to hear and share their grievance against someone else. If my boy really loved me he would see how selfish his father is… if my brother loved me he would make a party with me against my sister… if you loved me you wouldn’t let me be treated like this…
And all the while they remain unaware of the real road. ‘If you would be loved, be lovable,’ said Ovid.
—C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves