Marriage Quote by Hugh Leonard

Grief, in Leonard's hands, isn't a softening halo; it's a brutal credential. The line risks sounding monstrous - "since my wife died" is a trapdoor clause - then pivots into a hard-earned ethics: pain as the only reliable tutor in decency. That's the dramatist's instinct for tension: he doesn't ask for sympathy, he dares you to judge him before he shows you the engine driving the change.

The specific intent feels less like confession than provocation. "Much nicer" is deliberately plain, almost childish, as if language itself has been stripped down by loss. Then comes the qualifying phrase, "on that level", which quietly admits the limits of the transformation. He's not claiming sainthood; he's pointing to one calibrated adjustment in his moral instrument panel. The subtext is that empathy isn't an idea you adopt, it's a threshold you cross, usually involuntarily. Pain is what dismantles the smug fantasy that other people's suffering is optional, or distant, or deserved.

Context matters: Leonard grew up in a Catholic Ireland where grief often came with scripts - stoicism, piety, uplifting lessons. This line refuses uplift. It's unsentimental and a little abrasive, as if he's allergic to elegy. In one sentence, he stages a miniature drama about how trauma can widen your capacity for others without making the event itself meaningful or "worth it". Niceness, here, is not a virtue-signaled pose; it's damage translated into restraint.