always with the same person

Dedicated to Dan & Julie, who are celebrating their 3-year wedding anniversary today and to Arik & Marissa, who just got engaged!

A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person.

-Mignon McLaughlin

This above all:

This above all: to thine own self be true.

Hamlet Act 1, Scene iii
William Shakespeare

A man sees things differently...

A man sees things differently at different times in his life.

Big Fish

Landscape [Excerpt]

Every morning I walk like this around
the pond thinking: if the doors of my heart
ever close, I am as good as dead

Landscape [Excerpt]
Mary Oliver

i mean it.

I don’t exactly know what I mean by that, but I mean it.

Holden Caufield
The Catcher in the Rye
JD Salinger

two things that have no limit

There are two things that have no limit: femininity and the means to which it is used.

La Femme Nikita

Klimt - Hygeia

why not? - Kristi 219

The best approach I've heard on how to live one's life on a moment by moment basis...

"Sure, why not?"

- Kristi 219

a wise strategy for living?

Is this really a wise strategy for living? Insisting that most of life isn’t to be taken seriously. Relentlessly viewing it as a cosmic joke. Having only four guiding principles: one, do as little to harm others as possible; two, be there always for your friends; three, be responsible for yourself and ask nothing of others; four, grab all the fun you can. Put no stock in the opinions of anyone except those closest to you. Forget about leaving a mark on this world. Ignore the great issues of your time and thereby improve your digestion. Don’t dwell in the past. Don’t worry about the future. Live in the moment. Trust in the purpose of your existence and let meaning come to you instead of straining to discover it. When life throws a hard punch roll with it – but roll with laughter. Catch the wave, dude.

This is how Bobby lives, and he is the happiest and most well-balanced person I have ever known.

Fear Nothing
Dean Koontz

White Dog

I went for a walk on Hollywood Boulevard.
I looked down and there was a large white dog
walking beside me.
his pace was exactly the same as mine.
we stopped at traffic signals together.
a woman smiled at us.
he must have walked 8 blocks with me.
then I went into a grocery store and
when I came out he was gone.
or she was gone.
the wonderful white dog
with a trace of yellow in its fur.
the large blue eyes were gone.
the grinning mouth was gone.
the lolling tongue was gone.

things are so easily lost.
things just can't be kept forever.

I got the blues.
I got the blues.
that dog loved and
trusted me and
I let it walk away.

White Dog
Charles Bukowski

Dogfish [Excerpt]

I wanted the past to go away, I wanted
to leave it, like another country; I wanted
my life to close, and open
like a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the song
where it falls
down over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery;
I wanted
to hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know,

whoever I was, I was

alive
for a little while.


Dogfish [excerpt]
Mary Oliver

two insomnias!

When I am with you, we stay up all night.
When you’re not here, I can’t go to sleep.

Praise God for these two insomnias!
And the difference between them.

-Rumi

i like my body when it is with your body.

i like my body when it is with your
body. It is so quite a new thing.
Muscles better and nerves more.
i like your body. i like what it does,
i like its hows. i like to feel the spine
of your body and its bones, and the trembling
-firm-smooth ness and which i will
again and again and again
kiss, i like kissing this and that of you,
i like,, slowly stroking the, shocking fuzz
of your electric fur, and what-is-it comes
over parting flesh....And eyes big love-crumbs,

and possibly i like the thrill

of under me you quite so new


e.e. cummings

Beethoven Frieze

Love is...

Love is love's reward.
-John Dryden

Love is an irresistible desire, to be irresistibly desired.
-Robert Frost

What is love but that which poisons the body, clouds the mind, yet envigorates the soul.
-Adam Murphy

Loving someone is giving them the power to hurt you, but trusting them not to.
-Anonymous

Love is not love that alters when it alteration finds.
-William Shakespeare

quote added by Goldie:
My God, these folks don't know how to love...that's why they love so easily.
-D. H. Lawrence

don't kiss your honey

From and for Jill Scott:

Don’t kiss your honey
when your nose is kinda runny
cause you might thinks it’s funny
but it’s snot.

In Love

For what is the beloved? She is that which I myself am not. In the act of love, I am pure male, and she is pure female. She is she and I am I, and clasped together with her, I know how perfectly she is not me, how perfectly I am not her, how utterly we are two, the light and the darkness, and how infinitely and eternally not-to-be-comprehended by either of us is the surpassing One we make.

In Love [excerpt]
D.H. Lawrence

The Great Hunt [excerpt] - Carl Sandburg

I never knew any more beautiful than you:
I have hunted you under my thoughts,
I have broken down under the wind
And into the roses looking for you
I shall never find any
greater than you.

The Great Hunt [excerpt]
Carl Sandburg

when I next see you

I want to cover you with love when I next
see you, with caresses, with ecstasy. I want
to gorge you with all the joys of the flesh,
until you faint and die. I want you to be
astonished by me, to confess to yourself that
you had never even dreamed of such transports.
I am the one who has been
happy, now I want you to be the same.
When you are old, I want you to recall
those few hours. I want your dry bones
to quiver with joy when you think of them.

-Gustave Flaubert from a letter to Louise Colet dated August 15, 1846

our souls are made of

Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.

Emily Bronte

I Wish You Love

On the myspace page of a girl whose fiance left her. They were together 5 years.


I wish you bluebirds in the spring
To give your heart a song to sing
I wish you health
And more than wealth
I wish you love

And in July a lemonade
To cool you in some leafy glade
I wish you health
And more than wealth
I wish you love

My breaking heart and I agree
That you and I could never be
So with my best
My very best
I set you free

I wish you shelter from the storm
And a cozy fire to keep you warm
And most of all
When snowflakes fall
I wish you love

strangers who knew each other

We were like strangers who knew each other very well.

Big Fish

my first love story

The minute I heard my first love story
I started looking for you, not knowing
how blind that was.

Lovers don't finally meet somewhere.
They're in each other all along.

- Rumi

I Still Love You

bodega on 23rd Street and 3rd Avenue in NYC

I Still Love You

anonymous, posted on postsecret.blogspot.com

more to me

The simple lack of her is more to me than others' presence.

Edward Thomas

La Vie en Rose

Hold me close and hold me fast
The magic spell you cast
This is la vie en rose

When you kiss me heaven sighs
And though I close my eyes
I see la vie en rose

When you press me to your heart
I’m in a world apart
A world where roses bloom

And when you speak...angels sing from above
Everyday words seem...to turn into love songs

Give your heart and soul to me
And life will always be
La vie en rose.

La Vie en Rose
-Mack David, Original French lyrics by Edith Piaf

Tonight I Can Write

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Write, for example, "The night is starry
and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance."

The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

Through nights like this one I held her in my arms.
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.

She loved me, sometimes I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.

To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.

What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is starry and she is not with me.

This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

My sight tries to find her as though to bring her closer.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.

The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of that time, are no longer the same.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.

Another's. She will be another's. As she was before my kisses.
Her voice, her bright body. Her infinite eyes.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these the last verses that I write for her.

From Twenty Poems of Love
Pablo Neruda