It's easy to fall in love. It's considerably more difficult to build and maintain a healthy relationship. That, of course, takes time and patience. There was a recent story in the news about an American couple from Wisconsin who celebrated their 80th wedding anniversary. Their names are Dorothy and Roy Fleming and they were married on February 6, 1932. Roy, who was a spry 20-years-old on their wedding day is now 100. His 15-year-old bride, Dorothy, is now a feisty 95-year-old.
Ray is a long-retired tool-and-dye maker with an easy-going personality. He and Dorothy met at an ice- skating rink in Milwaukee. Her father had some misgivings about his daughter getting married at such a young age. Yet, the marriage certainly did endure. Dorothy and Ray have two sons, Earl and Allan, four grandchildren and seven great grandchildren and six great-great grandchildren.
What is their secret? Well, Dorothy told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that it's compromise, knowing when to give in.
QUOTATIONS ABOUT LOVE
Real love is a pilgrimage. It happens when there is no strategy, but it is very rare because most people are strategists.
- Anita Brookner (1928- British novelist and art historian
From Women Writer Talk [1989]
Love - is anterior to Life -
Posterior to Death -
Initial of Creation, and
The Exponent of Earth -
- Emily Dickinson (1804-1881), American poet
Love - is anterior to Life
Love is mutually feeding each other, not one living on another like a ghoul.
- Bessie Head (1937-1986), South African-born writer
From A Question of Power [1973]
To cheat oneself out of love is the most terrible deception; it is an eternal loss for which there is no reparation, either in time or in eternity.
- Soren Kerkegaard (1813-1855), Danish philosopher and theologian
From Works of Love, Hong & Hong translation
Once when I was very young and true,
Someone left me sad -
Broke my brittle heart in two;
And that was very bad.
Love is for unlucky folk.
Love is but a curse.
Once there was a heart I broke;
And that I think is worse.
- Dorothy Parker
A Very Short Song
At night, there was the feeling that we had come home, feeling no longer alone, waking in the night to find the other one there, and not gone away; all other things were unreal. We slept when we were tired and if we woke the other one woke too so one was not alone. Often a man wishes to be alone and a woman wishes to be alone too and if they love each other they are jealous of that in each other, but I can truly say we never felt that. We could feel alone when we were together, alone against the others. We were never lonely and never afraid when we were together.
- Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), American writer
From A Farewell to Arms
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.
- Carl Sandburg, American poet
From The Great Hunt
Let's finish with some quotes from a couple of Frenchmen since the French like to talk about "l'amour."
People who are not in love fail to understand how an intelligent man can suffer because of a very ordinary woman. This is like being surprised that anyone should be stricken with cholera because of a creature so insignificant as the comma bacillus.
- Marcel Proust (1871 - 1922), French novelist and critic
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| Proust |
Nothing is sweeter than love, nothing stronger, nothing loftier nothing grander, nothing pleasanter, nothing fuller, nothing better in heaven or on earth.
- Henri Matisse French artist (1869-1954)
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| Matisse |
HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY
- Joanne