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Humor & Life Quote by Margaret Cho

"If we have the opportunity to be generous with our hearts, ourselves, we have no idea of the depth and breadth of love's reach"

About this Quote

Generosity, in Margaret Cho's hands, is never the soft-focus kind. Coming out of comedy - a craft built on timing, exposure, and the controlled risk of saying the unsayable - she frames love as something you don't measure in advance. The line pivots on a sly idea: we "have the opportunity" to be generous, but we routinely treat that opportunity like a choice we can postpone until we're less tired, less afraid, less ourselves. Cho needles that instinct without scolding it, using the intimate phrase "with our hearts, ourselves" to suggest that the real expense isn't money or effort; it's vulnerability.

The subtext is Cho's long-running critique of transactional living: the way affection becomes conditional, earned, audited. "We have no idea" doesn't romanticize ignorance; it indicts our obsession with control. We want love to be predictable, to stay within the borders of who's deserving, who's safe, who's family, who's not going to disappoint us. Cho points at the punchline hiding in plain sight: love's "reach" is biggest precisely when you stop trying to manage the outcome. Generosity becomes a kind of surrender.

Context matters, because Cho's public persona has been shaped by candor about identity, addiction, family conflict, and the costs of being visible. For her, "generous" doesn't mean performatively nice; it means refusing the smallness that fear demands. The sentence stretches outward - depth and breadth - like a set expanding beyond the club, insisting that what we call love is often just caution with better PR.

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TopicLove
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Margaret Cho: Generosity of Heart and the Reach of Love
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About the Author

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Margaret Cho (born December 5, 1968) is a Comedian from USA.

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