Anything.
Recent Responses
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I might define love by the quotes of others, arranged thusly:
"Love, love, love. All th' wurruld is love. Soft an' sweet an' sticky it covers th' globe." - Peter Finley Dunne
"To love a thing means wanting it to live." - Confucious
"Love should be a tree whose roots are deep in the earth, but whose branches extend into heaven." - Bertrand Russell
"What the bloom is on fruit, the charm of novelty is to love; it imparts a lustre which is easily effaced and which never returns." - La Rochefoucauld
"The loving are the daring." - Bayard Taylor
"Oh, love is real enough; you will find it someday, but it has one archenemy -- and that is life." - Jean Anouilh
"Love is often nothing but a favorable exchange between two people who get the most of what they can expect, considering their value on the personality market." - Erich Fromm
"It seems it is madder never to abandon one's self that often to be infatuated; better to be wounded, a captive and a slave, than always to walk in armor." - Margaret Fuller
"Love is not always blind and there are few things that cause greater wretchedness than to love with all your heart someone who you know is unworthy of love." - W. Somerset Maugham
"If you'd be loved, be worthy to be loved." - Ovid
"We don't love qualities, we love persons..." - Jacques Maritain
"We never, then, love a person, but only qualities." - Blaise Pascal
"Try to reason about love, and you will lose your reason." - French proverb
"They love too much that die for love." - English proverb
"Love makes the time pass. Time makes love pass." - French proverb
"What we call love is the desire to awaken and to keep awake in another's body, heart and mind, the responsibility of flattering, in our place, the self of which we are not very sure." - Paul Géraldy
"Love is the wisdom of the fool and the folly of the wise." - Samuel Johnson
"Love is simple to understand if you haven't got a mind soft and full of holes. It's a crutch, that's all, and there isn't a one of us doesn't need a crutch." - Norman Mailer
"It is impossible to love and be wise." - Francis Bacon
"Love is done when Love's begun,
Sages say,
But have Sages known?" - Emily Dickinson
"There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness." - Friedrich Nietzsche
"Love compels cruelty
To those who do not understand love." - T. S. Eliot
"Love, like a tear, rises in the eye and falls upon the breast." - Publilius Syrus
"Love built on beauty, soon as beauty, dies." - John Donne
"O, beauty, are you not enough?
Why am I crying after love?" - Sara Teasdale
"Who would give a law to lovers?
Love is unto itself a higher law." - Boethius
"To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god." - Jorge Luis Borges
"Immature love says: 'I love you because I need you.' Mature love says: 'I need you because I love you.'" - Erich Fromme
"Love is an excuse for its own faults." - Italian proverb
"Love is
unworldly
and nothing
comes of it but love." - William Carlos Williams
"It is its own value." - Thornton Wilder
"Love is all we have, the only way
that each can help the other." - Euripides
"Pleasure of love lasts but a moment,
Pain of love lasts a lifetime." - Jean Pierre Claris de Florian
"Where there is love, there is pain." - Spanish proverb
"Pains of love be sweeter far
Than all other pleasures are." - John Dryden
"He that shuts Love out, in turn shall be
Shut out from Love, and on her threshold lie
Howling in the outer darkness." - Alfred, Lord Tennyson
"Love is not love until love's vulnerable." - Theodore Roethke
"To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world." - Antoine Saint-Exupéry
"We are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person." - W. Somerset Maugham
"One word
Frees us of all the weight and pain of life:
That word is love." - Sophocles
"Him that I love, I wish to be
Free --
Even from me." - Anne Morrow Lindbergh
"Love is the child of illusion and the parent of disillusion." - Miguel de Unamuno
"Love is the true price of love." - George Herbert
"Love knows hidden paths." - German proverb
"Love is a mystery which, when solved, evaporates." - Ned Rorem -
Whatever will be will be whatever.
Or
It is what it is, and possibly more. -
Yes. Sometimes I like peanut butter on my toast.
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Four months ago I was asked "What would your perfect day look like?" I gave the following answer:
"It would look like any other. I can't expect the supernatural from a day. Perfection in any real sense requires no miracles.
As for what I'd do, it's hard to say. It depends when that day might happen, in what season and what place. And I'm not even positive my actions could contribute to the day's perfection.
My stance on a perfect day looks similar to my stance on an excellent book. A book looks like a book and it is one. It is made of paper and words, and you hold it, and you buy into it. Seen externally, it may not appear a world unto itself. The action in it could be of nearly any variety -- what gives it quality is the manner in which the action is expressed, the style of the thing, the meaningful coherence of its themes.
Maybe a mountain would be involved."
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I like that answer. It's an answer to a different question, I suppose, but I think the answer for this question is the same. I'm not sure that what the day consists of would contribute to the day's perfection.
I could say that there would be time to think and time to write and maybe even sunlight. I could say that there would probably be a succession of people and enough time to spend with them singly in or small groups. For some reason I'm thinking of this situation as a beautiful day of death. Regardless, though, none of that need be in a day to make it perfect, even a perfect day of dying.
So, I don't know. It might be the case that in order for the day to be perfect it must be a surprise, if only mildly so, is only in part. -
Bacon suspenders! For myself.
Bacon hat! For everyone but you.
For you? Bacon suspenders, too! -
Most definitely extreme giraffe riding.
I just looked up "Extreme giraffe riding" on YouTube and encountered a number of videos concerning tall unicycles. That is not that I mean at all.
Of the other two choices I have tried only one (ziplining) but find the other (skydiving) more exciting.
Coincidentally, I have ridden what I was told was the longest zipline in America, which is in Hawaii and crosses a small valley. My mother, who was nearly sixty at the time, went after me. -
What about jelly?
Butter, usually, for its convenience. Nutella in whimsical moods. Rarely jam. Marmalade almost never, but probably due more to its scarcity than anything else.
A year ago I made a whole lot of apple butter, which is really more like jam, from the apples of a nearby orchard. It was delicious. Delicious. -
I was thinking of this on the patio a few hours ago reading through the sunset. I put the book down and looked at the grass that was starting to sprout through the mud and the soft dirt and then I saw a squirrel and some birds and I watched the birds. They flew quickly and one that I followed perched itself up on a wire near a neighbor's balcony across the lawn. I took note of the beautiful light and the fading sky and the pleasant temperature and the earthy smell of the air, and I took note of the rows of windows with their blinds all closed and one window where the blinds stirred from the touch of a person or maybe a pet.
I crave interaction, but it can become overbearing. Maybe I crave subtlety.
This is true: I want the company of strangers who I have more reason to suspect would love me than hate me, or who seem to like me more than they dislike me. It is also true that I don't feel I often have that, though I believe that may be a cultural phenomenon in the States, as I've tended to feel more welcome, more anonymously appreciated, elsewhere.
I should stipulate, though, that I need occasional isolation even from the best company, and probably more than most. But what I prefer -- that would be a kind of interaction that willingly offers the benefit of the doubt that strangers and friends alike deserve both appreciation and time. -
The simple way to put it is "ignorance," but it's a kind of willful ignorance usually revealed in speech. The unskilled use of adverbs in writing or in speech. I can be put off when people say the words "honestly" or "actually" without crafting the phrase carefully.
Babble. Conversational chit-chat. The need to fill silence with noise that has no other purpose. Spending sound, if that makes sense. Wasting voice. Diluting the meaning in language, to be more pretentious.
But a close contender is observational oblivion. When someone fails to take note of relevant details around them, it can be bothersome.
I'm finding it difficult to answer this question without seeming more bitter or irritable than I'd like to think I am, so thank you for that. -
Norway. Environmental, healthy. Mountains, snow, hiking. The fjords, the empty largeness.
But what's a place? -
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You don't say what you mean.
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While I've known about the Game for some time, I don't believe I lost the Game when I first read this question a few hours ago. I've since lost, but I am playing again.
But I can acknowledge the existence of a thing without thinking about it. I can even speak about things, including the Game, without thinking about those things. I believe I could have a conversation about the Game without losing the Game, but it would require some skill and possibly some doublethink.
In many conversations, of course, I would lose. As I have here. -
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It's on! You've got me. Hello?
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A new moon is any instance in which the moon appears dark from earth as the result of its sunny side facing away. A lunar eclipse, on the other hand, is any instance in which the brightness of the moon would be visible were it not for the shadow of the earth.
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I'm humbled.
I've only asked you all the really good ones. -
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Joe Parslow’s Bio
Albany, NY
I have been to 18 countries, consumed both wild boar and reindeer, and sometimes wear an impressive beard.
You'll just have to get to know me.
