Art for the Blog of It: Art for the Pop of It: Wayne Thiebaud.

Art for the Blog of It: Art for the Pop of It: Wayne Thiebaud.: Art for the Pop of It: Wayne Thiebaud. :  

Art for the Blog of It: This is interesting, I had no idea.

Art for the Blog of It: This is interesting, I had no idea.:  

Big winner....sort of

 

On some game shows, contestants can win new cars, all-expense-paid vacation, and cash. But there is tax to be paid on those gifts which makes the gift not worth the taking. Bear in mind, in California, where most of these shows are filmed, the tax is due upfront. And there’s no getting around it. Winning contestants are handed a 1099G form from the show before they leave the studio. Also, winning big prize money or prizes can place the receiver into another tax bracket.

 

UFO stories

 

The Chiles-Whitted UFO encounter occurred at approximately 2:45 AM on July 24, 1948, in the skies near Montgomery, Alabama. That day, two commercial pilots (Chiles and Whitted) claimed to have observed a "glowing object" pass by their plane before it appeared to pull up into a cloud and travel out of sight.

After landing in Atlanta, Georgia, the pilots reported their sightings to the United States Air Force and were interviewed for Project Sign, the first Air Force research group assigned to investigate UFO sightings. The pilots were both combat-experienced and gave painstaking into what they had seen so much so that the investigators agreed that “this was the first time two reliable sources had been really close enough to a UFO to get a good look."

However, the top brass rejected the investigation results because "the report's evidence was insufficient to support its conclusions." and concluded that the pilots had actually seen a very bright meteor.

                                                          The UFO’s of Wythe County

Wythe County Virginia is just southwest of Blacksburg. Named for George Wythe, the first Virginian to sign the Declaration of Independence and was partially settled by Moses Austin, father of Stephen F. Auston, one of the founders of the Republic of Texas.

In October 1987, Wythe County Sheriff Wayne Pike reported that he and his deputies witnessed strange lights in the sky. The police report made the wire services and within a year there were 3,000 reports of UFO sightings in the area. Some said the county was experiencing mass hysteria.

The most famous incident in the rash sighting actually happened in nearby Smyth County when a UFO was seen flying across a mountainside and blasting a tree with its heat-ray. Investigators checked out the tree stump, but it appeared that someone had tried to smoke a squirrel out of the tree and set a fire that built up inside the trunk until it literally blew up.

The people of Wythe said otherwise. Many blamed the US Air Force, claiming that the sightings were part of a secret military operation. Included in that group was Danny Gordon, the news director for the local radio station WYVE. "It appears,” he said, “we are dealing with something of a military nature "A lot of people are scared. Will the military please tell us where they are?"

                                              The Gorman/UFO dogfight

The Gorman dogfight took place on October 1, 1948, in the skies over Fargo, North Dakota although in 1949 the USAF concluded…of course… that the Gorman dogfight had been caused by a lighted weather balloon…you think they would get tired of using that excuse.

Only 25 years old when the incident occurred, George F. Gorman was a veteran fighter pilot of World War II and was serving as a second lieutenant in the North Dakota National Guard.

On October 1, 1948, Gorman was participating in a cross-country flight with other National Guard pilots, flying a P-51 Mustang. His flight arrived over Fargo at approximately 8:30 PM.

Although the other pilots decided to land at Fargo's Hector Airport, Gorman decided to take advantage of the clear, cloudless conditions and get in some night-flying time, staying aloft.

Around 9:00 PM Gorman saw another object to his west that had a blinking light. At 9:07 PM Gorman contacted the control tower at Hector Airport and asked if it had any air traffic in the area other than his P-51 and the Piper Cub. The tower answered no, he was alone up there as far as radar was concerned. But the Piper Cub pilot, Dr. A.D. Cannon and his passenger answered that they could also see a lighted object to the west.

Gorman told the tower that he was going to pursue the object to determine its identity. He moved his Mustang to full power (350 to 400 MPH), but the object was going too fast for him to catch it

Instead, he tried cutting the object off by turns and approached the object head-on at 5,000 feet but the object flew over his plane at a distance of about 500 feet. Gorman described the object as a simple "ball of light" about six to eight inches in diameter. He also noted later that when the object increased its speed, it stopped blinking and grew brighter.

After a near-collision, Gorman lost sight of the object; when he saw it again it appeared to have made a 180-degree turn and was coming at him again. The object then made a sudden vertical climb; Gorman followed the object in his own steep climb. At 14,000 feet his P-51 stalled; the object was still 2,000 feet above him. The object made another head-on pass but broke off before coming close to his fighter. It then moved over Hector Airport where it was seen by the air traffic controller, L.D. Jensen.

Gorman followed the object until he was about twenty-five miles southwest of Fargo. At 14,000 feet he observed the light at 11,000 feet; he then dived on the object at full power. However, the object made a vertical climb. He tried to pursue but watched as the object passed out of visual range. At this point he broke off the chase; it was 9:27 PM. Gorman flew back to Hector Airport.

Within a few hours, military officers from Project Sign – the United States Air Force's (USAF) study of UFO phenomena – arrived to interview Gorman, Dr. Cannon, his passenger, and the control tower personnel at Hector Airport. The officers also checked Gorman's P-51 Mustang with a Geiger counter for radiation. They found that the Mustang was measurably more radioactive than other fighters which had not flown for several days; this was taken as evidence that Gorman had flown close to an "atomic-powered" object.

However, the Air Weather Service revealed that on October 1 it had released a lighted weather balloon from Fargo at 8:50 PM. By 9 PM the balloon would have been in the area where Gorman and the Piper Cub passengers first saw the lighted object. Project Sign's investigators also believed that the incredible movements of the object were due to Gorman's own maneuvers as he chased the light—the object's maneuvers were an illusion brought about by the movements of Gorman's fighter.

 

Several branches of the military did come forward but only to deny they had anything to do with sightings. However, the Tennessee Air National Guard did come forward to suggest that the sightings began at about the same time that they started making refueling flights in the area.

Since the most common sighting were of a group of lights that appear to hover close together before splitting apart in the night skies while others have reported a flying object that appears to be pulling another object along, a mid-air refueling seemed to make sense.

A spokesman for the Tennessee Air National Guard said "We started doing them more frequently in that area about a month or a month and a half ago. I personally haven't seen anything up there. It'd certainly be a good guess. That'd be the best answer I could offer."

 

 

 

The Lady in Black, and the Mysterious Headstone of XYZ

 

In a quiet corner of the Fountain Hill Cemetery in Deep River Connecticut is a tombstone sparse in details except for three letters, “XYZ.”

In 1899, police learned that some hoods were planning to rob the very wealthy Deep River Savings Bank. The town was flush with prosperity from the ivory trade. Police informed the bank managers who hired a night watchman named Harry D. Tyler.

As fate should have it, in the early morning hours of December 13, 1899, between 1 and 1:30 a.m., four men attempted to break into the bank. Tyler fired a blast from his shotgun, killing one of the men as he entered a window. It was a direct hit in the head. The other fled. The man, unidentified, was buried in town with a grave marked, for unknown reasons, only with the letters XYZ.

To this day, no one knows who he was. However, and this is mostly legend, every year a woman dressed completely in black visited the grave until the late 1940s when she no longer returned. According to legend, she took the train into the town and took the train out again and spoke to no one.

At one point, the Pinkerton Detective Agency, a good that was amazingly good at what they did duet their street contacts, reported that the dead man was a bank robber named

Frank Ellis (AKA Frank Howard and Tommy Brent) but that had never been confirmed.

But there is some scant evidence, based on a post card found on his person, that the dead man was F. B. King, Formerly of Albany New York. The sender, a bartender in New York’s tenderloin district named T. J. Farley, said that the dead man description matched F.B. King. King, he said, had been a brakeman on the Boston and Albany railroad. The state police assumed, based on the high grade of burglary tools near the body, that the dead man was a professional thief.

We lost an H Bomb.

 

In 1968 a US plane carrying four H-bombs crashed into sea ice in Greenland and exploded, contaminating the area around the site with radiation.

Operation Chrome Dome was a US airborne alert program initiated in 1961 during the Cold War. As part of the operation’s, nuclear-armed Boeing B-52 Stratofortress bombers were flown to designated points on the Soviet Union’s border as a deterrent to the Soviets. Four bombers remained on alert each day, with the flights being conducted without the knowledge of civilian authorities in the States.

On or about January 21, 1968, one of the B-52 bombers was assigned to fly over the Thule Air Base, the US Air Force’s northernmost base on the Danish territory of Greenland. The bomber carried four hydrogen bombs.

It was an otherwise normal flight until, six hours into the flight, a fire started in the plane and the crew couldn’t extinguish the flames. A mandatory third pilot named Major Alfred D'Mario had placed three cloth-covered foam cushions on top of a heating vent under the instructor navigator's seat in the aft section of the lower deck. Shortly after take-off, another cushion was placed under the seat which ignited.

The captain declared it an emergency and requested emergency landing at Thule airbase. Minutes later the plane lost electricity and the cockpit was overwhelmed by dense smoke rendering the instruments useless to read and making an emergency landing impossible. Six members of the crew managed to, but co-pilot Leonard Svitenko died in the accident. (Captain Curtis R. was found six miles away from the base, lost on the ice for 21 hours. Although he suffered hypothermia, he survived by wrapping himself in the parachute.)

The bomber had continued flying, over the air base and crashed into dense sea ice in the nearby North Star Bay. The hydrogen bombs detonated on impact, but a nuclear explosion was not triggered due to the design of the weapon. However, the detonation still dispersed a huge nuclear payload that contaminated the area with radioactivity. Gallon and gallon of Jet fuel burned for six hours after the crash, melting the ice sheet sinking the bomber into the ocean.

The entire area was filled with radioactive contamination. Understandably, the Danes demanded the nuclear material not be left in Greenland after the cleanup operation was complete, so the contaminated ice and wreckage were packed in steel tanks and shipped back to the US. Some 700 specialized personnel from both countries had worked for nine months to clean up the site, usually without adequate protective clothing or decontamination measures.

Worse yet, one of the bombs had not been recovered although the US Military insisted that all four bombs were destroyed. In 2008, a partly declassified documents appeared to confirm that within weeks of the accident, investigators realized only three of the weapons could be accounted for.

The Chrome Dome operation was suspended immediately following this disaster. The incident caused a major political scandal in Denmark because the country had designated itself a nuclear-free zone, yet government officials knew that the US Army was stockpiling nuclear weapons there.

In the US, the scandal deepened after it was learned that in 1966, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara proposed cutting the flights because they had been made obsolete by new technology. Also, cutting the operation would save the US $950 million dollars. However, the Strategic Air Command (SAC) and the Joint Chiefs of Staff opposed the plan and McNamara agreed to a compromise of allowing a smaller force of four bombers would be on alert each day. But the SAC continued the operation without the knowledge of civilian authorities who SAC commanders determined did not have the "need to know" about specific operational points.

 

WHAT IS LOVE?

 

C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves:

There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket — safe, dark, motionless, airless – it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.

 

Lemony Snicket in Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can’t Avoid:

Love can change a person the way a parent can change a baby — awkwardly, and often with a great deal of mess.

 

Ambrose Bierce, with the characteristic wryness of The Devil’s Dictionary:

Love, n. A temporary insanity curable by marriage.

 

English novelist Iris Murdoch, cited by the great Milton Glaser in How to Think Like a Great Graphic Designer:

Love is the very difficult understanding that something other than yourself is real.

 

Agatha Christie, who echoes Anaïs Nin above in her autobiography:

It is a curious thought, but it is only when you see people looking ridiculous that you realize just how much you love them.

 

“That’s when I finally got it. I finally understood. It wasn’t the thought that counted. It was the actual execution that mattered, the showing up for somebody. The intent behind it wasn’t enough. Not for me. Not anymore. It wasn’t enough to know that deep down, he loved me. You had to actually say it to somebody, show them you cared. And he just didn’t. Not enough.” ― Jenny Han

 

“Most men claim to desire driven, independent and confident women. Yet when confronted with such a creature reverence often evolves into resent. For just like women, men need to be needed.”  ―Tiffany Madison

 

“It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.” ―Friedrich Nietzsche

 

“No relationship is perfect, ever. There are always some ways you have to bend, to compromise, to give something up in order to gain something greater…The love we have for each other is bigger than these small differences. And that’s the key. It’s like a big pie chart, and the love in a relationship has to be the biggest piece. Love can make up for a lot.” ―Sarah Dessen

 

“Love is a fire. But whether it is going to warm your hearth or burn down your house, you can never tell.” ―Joan Crawford

 

“Sometimes it’s a form of love just to talk to somebody that you have nothing in common with and still be fascinated by their presence.” ―David Byrne

 

“I no longer believed in the idea of soul mates, or love at first sight. But I was beginning to believe that a very few times in your life, if you were lucky, you might meet someone who was exactly right for you. Not because he was perfect, or because you were, but because your combined flaws were arranged in a way that allowed two separate beings to hinge together.” ―Lisa Kleypas

 

“As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.”  ―John Green

 

“When love is not madness it is not love.”  ― Pedro Calderón de la Barca

 

“Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person’s ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.” ―C.S. Lewis

 

“Sometimes love means letting go when you want to hold on tighter.” ―Melissa Marr

 

“The heart has its reasons which reason knows not.” ―Blaise Pascal

 

“Anyone who falls in love is searching for the missing pieces of themselves. So anyone who’s in love gets sad when they think of their lover. It’s like stepping back inside a room you have fond memories of, one you haven’t seen in a long time.”  ―Haruki Murakami

 

“I do not trust people who don’t love themselves and yet tell me, ‘I love you.’ There is an African saying which is: Be careful when a naked person offers you a shirt.”  ―Maya Angelou

 

“For the two of us, home isn’t a place. It is a person. And we are finally home.”  ―Stephanie Perkins

 

“You think because he doesn’t love you that you are worthless. You think that because he doesn’t want you anymore that he is right — that his judgement and opinion of you are correct. If he throws you out, then you are garbage. You think he belongs to you because you want to belong to him. Don’t. It’s a bad word, ‘belong.’ Especially when you put it with somebody you love. Love shouldn’t be like that. Did you ever see the way the clouds love a mountain? They circle all around it; sometimes you can’t even see the mountain for the clouds. But you know what? You go up top and what do you see? His head. The clouds never cover the head. His head pokes through, beacuse the clouds let him; they don’t wrap him up. They let him keep his head up high, free, with nothing to hide him or bind him. You can’t own a human being. You can’t lose what you don’t own. Suppose you did own him. Could you really love somebody who was absolutely nobody without you? You really want somebody like that? Somebody who falls apart when you walk out the door? You don’t, do you? And neither does he. You’re turning over your whole life to him. Your whole life, girl. And if it means so little to you that you can just give it away, hand it to him, then why should it mean any more to him? He can’t value you more than you value yourself.” ―Toni Morrison

 

“Anyone who loves in the expectation of being loved in return is wasting their time.”  ―Paulo Coelho

 

“Letting go doesn’t mean that you don’t care about someone anymore. It’s just realizing that the only person you really have control over is yourself.” ―Deborah Reber

 

“The course of true love never did run smooth.”  ―William Shakespeare

 

“Perhaps the reason we are unable to love is that we yearn to be loved, that is, we demand something (love) from our partner instead of delivering ourselves up to him demand-free and asking for nothing but his company.” ―Milan Kundera

 

“For my part, I prefer my heart to be broken.It is so lovely, dawn-kaleidoscopic within the crack.” ―D.H. Lawrence

 

“They say a good love is one that sits you down, gives you a drink of water, and pats you on top of the head. But I say a good love is one that casts you into the wind, sets you ablaze, makes you burn through the skies and ignite the night like a phoenix; the kind that cuts you loose like a wildfire and you can’t stop running simply because you keep on burning everything that you touch! I say that’s a good love; one that burns and flies, and you run with it!” ―C. JoyBell C.

 

The most precious gift we can offer anyone is our attention. When mindfulness embraces those we love, they will bloom like flowers. Thich Nhat Hanh

 

Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. James Baldwin

 

Love is now, is always. All that is missing is the coup de grâce — which is called passion. Clarice Lispector

 

when you love someone / you are scared of getting hurt / and you will get hurt Brandon Scott Gorrell

 

And now we’re apart and you’re just some stranger who knows all my secrets and all my family members and all my quirks and flaws and it doesn’t make sense. Gaby Dunn

 

He’s not perfect. You aren’t either, and the two of you will never be perfect. But if he can make you laugh at least once, causes you to think twice, and if he admits to being human and making mistakes, hold onto him and give him the most you can. He isn’t going to quote poetry, he’s not thinking about you every moment, but he will give you a part of him that he knows you could break. Don’t hurt him, don’t change him, and don’t expect for more than he can give. Don’t analyze. Smile when he makes you happy, yell when he makes you mad, and miss him when he’s not there. Love hard when there is love to be had. Because perfect guys don’t exist, but there’s always one guy that is perfect for you.

Bob Marley

 

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you, so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep your eyes close. Pablo Neruda

 

What most people call loving consists of picking out a woman and marrying her. They pick her out, I swear, I’ve seen them. As if you could pick in love, as if it were not a lightning bolt that splits your bones and leaves you staked out in the middle of the courtyard. They probably say that they pick her out because-they-love-her, I think it’s just the siteoppo. Beatrice wasn’t picked out, Juliet wasn’t picked out. You don’t pick out the rain that soaks you to a skin when you come out of a concert.

Julio Cortázar

 

It’s often just enough to be with someone. I don’t need to touch them. Not even talk. A feeling passes between you both. You’re not alone. Marilyn Monroe

 

We must get beyond passions, like a great work of art. In such miraculous harmony. We should learn to love each other so much to live outside of time… detached. Federico Fellini

 

I like not only to be loved, but also to be told I am loved. George Eliot

 

Love is the voice under all silences, the hope which has no opposite in fear; the strength so strong mere force is feebleness: the truth more first than sun, more last than star… E.E. Cummings

 

as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes. James Joyce

 

The only thing we never get enough of is love; and the only thing we never give enough of is love. Henry Miller

 

I fell in love with her courage, her sincerity, and her flaming self respect. And it’s these things I’d believe in, even if the whole world indulged in wild suspicions that she wasn’t all she should be. I love her and it is the beginning of everything. F. Scott Fitzgerald

 

i am afraid / that i am not learning fast enough; i can feel the universe expanding / and it feels like no one has ever tried hard enough; when i cried in your room /

 it was the effect of an extremely distinct sensation that ‘i am the only person / alive,’ ‘i have not learned enough,’ and ‘i can feel the universe expanding / and making things be further apart / and it feels like a declarative sentence / whose message is that we must try harder Tao Lin

 

We’re born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we’re not alone. Orson Welles

 

"One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life: That word is love." - Sophocles

 

"Attention is the most basic form of love; through it we bless and are blessed." - John Tarrant

 

"We love because it's the only true adventure." - Nikki Giovanni

 

"Love is like quicksilver in the hand. Leave the fingers open and it stays. Clutch it, and it darts away." - Dorothy Parker

 

"Love is friendship set on fire." - unknown

 

"Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing." - Goethe

 

"Love is everything it's cracked up to be. That's why people are so cynical about it...It really is worth fighting for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don't risk everything, you risk even more." - Erica Jong

 

"Sometimes love is stronger than a man's convictions." - Isaac Bashevis Singer

 

"Love is the master key that opens the gates of happiness." - Oliver Wendell Holmes

 

"Maybe love is like luck. You have to go all the way to find it." - Robert Mitchum

 

"Love stretches your heart and makes you big inside." - Margaret Walker

 

"Love has no awareness of merit or demerit; it has no scale... Love loves; this is its nature." - Howard Thurman

 

"Love is like war: Easy to begin but hard to end." - Anonymous

 

"Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other." - Rainer Maria Rilke

 

"Where love is, no room is too small." - Talmud

 

"Loves makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place." - Zora Neale Hurston

 

"Love is the irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired." - Mark Twain

 

"True love is eternal, infinite, and always like itself. It is equal and pure, without violent demonstrations: it is seen with white hairs and is always young in the heart." - Honore de Balzac

 

"Love is more than three words mumbled before bedtime. Love is sustained by action, a pattern of devotion in the things we do for each other every day." - Nicholas Sparks

 

"To love is to receive a glimpse of heaven." - Karen Sunde

 

"A love song is just a caress set to music." - Sigmund Romberg

 

"Love is an act of endless forgiveness, a tender look which becomes a habit." - Peter Ustinov

 

"Love is like a violin. The music may stop now and then, but the strings remain forever." - unknown

 

"Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence." - Erich Fromm

 

"In the final analysis, love is the only reflection of man's worth." - Bill Wundram, Iowa Quad Cities Times

 

"Love doesn't make the world go round, love is what makes the ride worthwhile." - Elizabeth Browning

 

"We're all a little weird, and life's a little weird. And when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall in mutual weirdness and call it love." — Dr. Seuss

 

The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread.  ~Mother Teresa

 

Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love.  ~Albert Einstein

 

There is no surprise more magical than the surprise of being loved.  It is God's finger on man's shoulder.  ~Charles Morgan

 

You have to walk carefully in the beginning of love; the running across fields into your lover's arms can only come later when you're sure they won't laugh if you trip.  ~Jonathan Carroll, "Outside the Dog Museum"

 

Ah me! love can not be cured by herbs.  ~Ovid

 

Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.  ~Erich Fromm

 

 

Love has no desire but to fulfill itself.  To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night.  To wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving.  ~Kahlil Gibran

 

Infatuation is when you think he's as sexy as Robert Redford, as smart as Henry Kissinger, as noble as Ralph Nader, as funny as Woody Allen, and as athletic as Jimmy Conners.  Love is when you realize that he's as sexy as Woody Allen, as smart as Jimmy Connors, as funny as Ralph Nader, as athletic as Henry Kissinger and nothing like Robert Redford - but you'll take him anyway.  ~Judith Viorst, Redbook, 1975

 

Love is only a dirty trick played on us to achieve continuation of the species.  ~W. Somerset Maugham, A Writer's Notebook, 1949

 

Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction.  ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars, 1939, translated from French by Lewis Galantière

 

When love is not madness, it is not love.  ~Pedro Calderon de la Barca

 

Let your love be like the misty rains, coming softly, but flooding the river.  ~Malagasy Proverb

 

Do I love you because you're beautiful,

Or are you beautiful because I love you?

~Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, Cinderella

 

For you see, each day I love you more

Today more than yesterday and less than tomorrow.

~Rosemonde Gerard

 

 

Forget love - I'd rather fall in chocolate!  ~Sandra J. Dykes

 

 

Love is much like a wild rose, beautiful and calm, but willing to draw blood in its defense.  ~Mark Overby

 

Love is a symbol of eternity.  It wipes out all sense of time, destroying all memory of a beginning and all fear of an end.  ~Author Unknown

 

Love - a wildly misunderstood although highly desirable malfunction of the heart which weakens the brain, causes eyes to sparkle, cheeks to glow, blood pressure to rise and the lips to pucker.  ~Author Unknown

 

Love is a sweet tyranny, because the lover endureth his torments willingly.  ~Proverb

 

The lover is a monotheist who knows that other people worship different gods but cannot himself imagine that there could be other gods.  ~Theodor Reik, Of Love and Lust, 1957

 

Hate leaves ugly scars, love leaves beautiful ones.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

 

Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind,

And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.

~William Shakespeare, Mid-Summer Night's Dream, 1595

 

The art of love... is largely the art of persistence.  ~Albert Ellis

 

Love one another and you will be happy.  It's as simple and as difficult as that.  ~Michael Leunig

 

 

Love must be as much a light, as it is a flame.  ~Henry David Thoreau

 

To find someone who will love you for no reason, and to shower that person with reasons, that is the ultimate happiness.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

 

Without love, what are we worth?  Eighty-nine cents!  Eighty-nine cents worth of chemicals walking around lonely.  ~Laurence Marks, M*A*S*H, "Love Story," original air date 7 January 1973, spoken by the character Hawkeye

 

A baby is born with a need to be loved - and never outgrows it.  ~Frank A. Clark

 

Love is the condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.  ~Robert Heinlein

 

The hours I spend with you I look upon as sort of a perfumed garden, a dim twilight, and a fountain singing to it.  You and you alone make me feel that I am alive.  Other men it is said have seen angels, but I have seen thee and thou art enough.  ~George Moore

 

The hardest-learned lesson:  that people have only their kind of love to give, not our kind.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

 

Absence diminishes small loves and increases great ones, as the wind blows out the candle and fans the bonfire.  ~François Duc de La Rochefoucauld

 

My debt to you, Belovèd,

Is one I cannot pay

In any coin of any realm

On any reckoning day.

~Jessie B. Rittenhouse

 

 

We choose those we like; with those we love, we have no say in the matter.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

 

The ultimate test of a relationship is to disagree but to hold hands.  ~Quoted by Alexandra Penney in Self

 

Love is, above all, the gift of oneself.  ~Jean Anouilh

 

When a man is in love or in debt, someone else has the advantage.  ~Bill Balance

 

Anyone can be passionate, but it takes real lovers to be silly.  ~Rose Franken

 

A bell is no bell 'til you ring it,

A song is no song 'til you sing it,

And love in your heart

Wasn’t put there to stay -

Love isn’t love

'Til you give it away.

~Oscar Hammerstein, Sound of Music, "You Are Sixteen (Reprise)"

(Thanks, Krystel)

 

Love is like dew that falls on both nettles and lilies.  ~Swedish Proverb

 

Passion makes the world go round.  Love just makes it a safer place.  ~Ice T, The Ice Opinion, quoted in Reader's Digest, "Quotable Quotes," February 2002

 

Love is no respecter of age or practicality

Neither morality: unabashed

She enters where she will

Unheeding that her immortal fires

Burn up human hearts...

~Phillip Pulfrey, from Beyond Me, www.originals.net

 

Love is an ocean of emotions entirely surrounded by expenses.  ~Lord Dewar

 

Only in love are unity and duality not in conflict.  ~Rabindranath Tagore

 

It is astonishing how little one feels alone when one loves.  ~John Bulwer

 

'Tis sweet to know there is an eye will mark our coming, and look brighter when we come. ~Lord Byron

 

A hundred hearts would be too few

To carry all my love for you.

~Author Unknown

 

Love is the thing that enables a woman to sing while she mops up the floor after her husband has walked across it in his barn boots. ~Author unknown, as printed in The Hoosier Farmer

 

You know you have found love when you can't find your way back. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

 

Love is an exploding cigar we willingly smoke. ~Lynda Barry

 

Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love; it is the faithless who know love's tragedies. ~Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891

 

Love cures people—both the ones who give it and the ones who receive it. ~Karl Menninger

 

If grass can grow through cement, love can find you at every time in your life. ~Cher

 

Love is staying up all night with a sick child - or a healthy adult. ~David Frost

 

Love doesn't sit there like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all of the time, made new. ~Ursula K. Le Guin

 

Love is not singular except in syllable. ~Marvin Taylor

 

People who are sensible about love are incapable of it. ~Douglas Yates

 

While duty measures the regard it owes

With scrupulous precision and nice justice,

Love never reasons, but profusely gives,

Gives, like a thoughtless prodigal, its all,

And trembles then, lest it has done too little.

~Hannah More

 

Ah me! why may not love and life be one? ~Henry Timrod

 

Take away love and our earth is a tomb. ~Robert Browning

 

Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds. ~William Shakespeare, "Sonnet CXVI"

 

He felt now that he was not simply close to her, but that he did not know where he ended and she began. ~Leo Tolstoy

 

It is the same in love as in war; a fortress that parleys is half taken. ~Marguerite de Valois

 

Love.... Its eternal goal is life.... No one who has ever brought up a child can doubt for a moment that love is literally the life-giving fluid of human existence. ~Smiley Blanton, quoted in Woman's Home Companion, 1956

 

A joyful heart is the inevitable result of a heart burning with love.  ~Mother Teresa

 

Sometimes the shortest distance between two points is a winding path walked arm in arm.  ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

 

No one can understand love who has not experienced infatuation.  And no one can understand infatuation, no matter how many times he has experienced it.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

 

Love me and the world is mine.  ~David Reed

 

It would be impossible to "love" anyone or anything one knew completely.  Love is directed towards what lies hidden in its object.  ~Paul Valéry, Tel quel, 1943

 

The love game is never called off on account of darkness.  ~Tom Masson

 

They who meet on an April night are forever lost in love, if there's moonlight all about and there's no moon above.  ~E.Y. "Yip" Harburg and Fred Saidy, dialogue just before the song "Old Devil Moon" in the musical Finian's Rainbow  (Thanks, Katherine!)

 

You know you're in love when you don't want to fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.  ~Dr. Seuss

 

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

 

The excesses of love soon pass, but its insufficiencies torment us forever.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

 

An old man in love is like a flower in winter.  ~Portuguese Proverb