A Loving Husband On His Birthday Quotes

As when astronaut Mike Mulhane was asked by a NASA psychiatrist what epitaph he'd like to have on his gravestone, Mulhane answered, "A loving husband and devoted father," though in reality, he jokes in "Riding Rockets," "I would have sold my wife and children into slavery for a ride into space. ~ Mary Roach

The inscription on his gravestone had felt so wholly insufficient the moment she saw it. Just a name and dates, carved by machine. Just the inadequate and impersonal. Loving Father and Husband, like every other headstone there, whether it was true or not. This was the tasteful way to do it, she knew, even though it showed none of the true shape of the man ~ Stuart Nadler

It is foreign to a man's nature to go on loving a person when he is told that he must and shall be that person's lover. There would be a much likelier chance of his doing it if he were told not to love. If the marriage ceremony consisted in an oath and signed contract between the parties to cease loving from that day forward, in consideration of personal possession being given, and to avoid each other's society as much as possible in public, there would be more loving couples than there are now. Fancy the secret meetings between the perjuring husband and wife, the denials of having seen each other, the clambering in at bedroom windows, and the hiding in closets! There'd be little cooling then. ~ Thomas Hardy

What do you envision for your future, Anna?"
His abrupt question struck a nerve in me. It was the same question I'd been asking myself for months.
"I don't know," I said. "I used to know what I wanted, but not anymore."
He considered this, watching me with curiosity. "What did you want?"
I reached down and touched the water. "A family, mostly."
"And you no longer want that?"
I dried my hands on my jeans, trying not to get emotional. At one time, I wanted a loving husband and a houseful of kids more than anything in the world. But I'd let go of those dreams. I couldn't even adopt a child. What would the Dukes say if they caught me playing house?
"I can't have those things," I told him, still avoiding his stare. "And I'm tired of wanting things I can't have."
His voice was low when he responded. "Perhaps children are out of the question, but you could still have a husband, in secret."
My eyes flew up to his, and my skin sizzled as his words settled over me. I opened my mouth, but couldn't speak. His light eyes played chicken with mine, not backing down from his claim.
"It's too dangerous," I said.
"You are young." He didn't state it in a condescending way, but I still bristled. "Someday you may agree that there are dangers worth facing."
I swallowed, wishing my crazy heart would stop trying to break out of my rib cage. ~ Wendy Higgins

But you are not under a system similar to that by which the Jews were obliged to pay tithes to the priests. If there were any such rule laid down in the Gospel, it would destroy the beauty of spontaneous giving and take away all the bloom from the fruit of your liberality! There is no law to tell me what I should give my father on his birthday. There is no rule laid down in any law book to decide what present a husband should give to his wife, nor what token of affection we should bestow upon others whom we love. No, the gift must be a free one, or it has lost all its sweetness. ~ Charles Spurgeon

But if he is angry at the world for doing him harm, why does he take it out on his loving partner? Couldn't he just as readily express his rage by playing racquetball or pounding pillows. His ideas about her role seem paradoxical. On the one hand, the narcissistic husband has vested his wife with tremendous power. She is necessary for his self-repair, but instead of valuing her and seeking comfort in her arms, he beats and humiliates her. Because he sees her as available to meet any and all of his needs, he releases his rage and any self-hate at her; such an act helps him ultimately feel powerful again, making him realize he is not weak and shattered.
When the narcissistic man eels the terror and rage associated with his own internal fragmentation, his outburst restores his sense of power and control. He turns the anger expanding within him away from himself, toward his wife. He insists that she's the defective one, she's to blame, because she has not met his needs. Such acts of externalization are key to the NPD batterer. His violent behavior restores his self-esteem. He believes that his actions are not his fault; he is just trying to take care of himself. ~ Susan Weitzman

The best part (or maybe the worst) of loving you is... that I never have any plan to stop.
Because I don't want to reach the end. Too afraid to catch the finish line.
Let me do it slowly, wobbly, as if I'm decrepit.
Because, by doing that, I have many years to go, never ending days to come... enough time... to stuck... with you.
Helplessly addicted, stupidly enraptured... by you.

I love you this way, and will keep loving you this way.
So come... wear your white gown... because there is a ring, waiting for your finger.
A vow, waiting for your mouth to say it out.
A man... waiting for you... to make a commitment to spend every tomorrow... together. Go hand in hand, to any kind of future we maybe have.

Let's be happy. Let me... to make you happy.
Come, marry me, and I will show you what kind of life you will get by laying down your happiness on my hand.
I will be thankful for every second, and I will make you feel the same.
Come, marry me. Because I want to make you my wife, and me, your husband.
Come, start it, and then end it. With me.... ~ Yuli Pritania

Closing The Cycle

One always has to know when a stage comes to an end. If we insist on staying longer than the necessary time, we lose the happiness and the meaning of the other stages we have to go through. Closing cycles, shutting doors, ending chapters - whatever name we give it, what matters is to leave in the past the moments of life that have finished.

Did you lose your job? Has a loving relationship come to an end? Did you leave your parents' house? Gone to live abroad? Has a long-lasting friendship ended all of a sudden?

You can spend a long time wondering why this has happened. You can tell yourself you won't take another step until you find out why certain things that were so important and so solid in your life have turned into dust, just like that. But such an attitude will be awfully stressing for everyone involved: your parents, your husband or wife, your friends, your children, your sister, everyone will be finishing chapters, turning over new leaves, getting on with life, and they will all feel bad seeing you at a standstill.

None of us can be in the present and the past at the same time, not even when we try to understand the things that happen to us. What has passed will not return: we cannot for ever be children, late adolescents, sons that feel guilt or rancor towards our parents, lovers who day and night relive an affair with someone who has gone away and has not the least intention of coming back.

Thi ~ Paulo Coelho

She's twenty-one and just by her hairstyle you can tell she's saving IT for the man she will marry. It's short at the sides and high on top, with a sideburn-length curl in front each ear. Look around you next time you're out strolling, there's hordes of them like her. They all wore braces when they were kids, played a lot of sports, were considered tom-boys, spent endless hours worrying about pimples, black-heads and acne, and wanted only one thing out of life-- get married and be a loving motherto both their children and their husband. In the meantime, they work at meaningful jobs like teaching and nursing until the Right Man comes along.
They're the reason Canadian men are amongst the most neurotic, childish and apathetic males on the Western continent. They need the challenge of a mature woman in order to bring out their maturity, and instead they're offered mamas. Yet it isn't the girls' fault. After all they're only being what men want them to be, what they think men want them to be. And vice-versa. Both sexes being what they think the other wants them to be and neither one really knowing because they've never asked their opposite what they would like, and this total absence of communication being the root cause of this great void between modern man and woman ~ Juan Antonio Butler

I'm the kind of girl who wants to get married in a big, white dress, wearing my grandma's pearls. I want a husband who loves me and is faithful to me. I want him to come home to me every night, and I don't want to have to worry if he's doing his secretary, because he's the kind of man who has too much honor to do that. I want to wait a year and then I want to start trying for the two kids that we'll eventually have, a girl and a boy. And when we have those kids, I do not want, one day, to have to look in their little faces and explain why their daddy is on the internet having relations with everyone from College Honeys to Cougars Gone Wild for money. I want to throw a cartoon themed birthday party at a jump house for my six year old, not mark the occasion by explaining what a "money shot" is. I have a feeling your life goals are somewhat different than mine. And by 'somewhat,' I mean, utterly and completely. Does that explain why it would be a waste of time for both of us to continue being in each other's presence? ~ Mia Sheridan

On the other hand, maybe what attracts us aren't the stories of falling apart so much as the stories of self-creation. The falling apart stuff is just a byproduct, a hazard of the trade. Maybe what I loved about Camille Claudel was what she created out of what she smashed to bits. How did a bourgeois girl become an artist and a woman? What was the female equivalent of the Great Man? If it didn't exist, why not? Who said it didn't? Who said it couldn't? What were the conditions that made it so hard? Rodin was the image Claudel identified with and against which she defined herself. Scott was this image for Zelda. A woman could not be a great artist and have a traditional marriage - not unless her husband was a Leonard Woolf. One boyfriend I had in college used to joke, 'Only one artist in the family,' meaning not me. I didn't get it then, but I get it now. There was always something self-annihilating in the act of loving, for a girl with creative aspirations - always - but far more then than now. The message, invariably, was that youthful passions lead to middle-age breakdowns, so choose your institution wisely. Marriage or the nuthouse. One or the other. It started to dawn on me that it wasn't that I was attracted to stories about girls who went mad, I was attracted to stories about girls with ambitions who wound up institutionalized. Getting locked up was not the result of adventure, it was the price you paid for adventure, it was your punishment. I had mistaken correlation f ~ Carina Chocano

I grew up on welfare in the South Bronx; I had a very tough upbringing in that neighborhood. Reading books like The Four Agreements, A Return to Love, and The Power of Now helped me to overcome many internal battles. Had I not worked on myself, put value in myself, I would not have the loving and supportive people that I have right now in my life, including my husband and children ~ Andrea Navedo

Cixi's lack of formal education was more than made up for by her intuitive intelligence, which she liked to use from her earliest years. In 1843, when she was seven, the empire had just finished its first war with the West, the Opium War, which had been started by Britain in reaction to Beijing clamping down on the illegal opium trade conducted by British merchants. China was defeated and had to pay a hefty indemnity.

Desperate for funds, Emperor Daoguang (father of Cixi's future husband) held back the traditional presents for his sons' brides – gold necklaces with corals and pearls – and vetoed elaborate banquets for their weddings. New Year and birthday celebrations were scaled down, even cancelled, and minor royal concubines had to subsidise their reduced allowances by selling their embroidery on the market through eunuchs. The emperor himself even went on surprise raids of his concubines' wardrobes, to check whether they were hiding extravagant clothes against his orders. As part of a determined drive to stamp out theft by officials, an investigation was conducted of the state coffer, which revealed that more "than nine million taels of silver had gone missing.

Furious, the emperor ordered all the senior keepers and inspectors of the silver reserve for the previous forty-four years to pay fines to make up the loss – whether or not they were guilty.

Cixi's great-grandfather had served as one of the keepers and his share of the fine amoun ~ Jung Chang

I close my eyes and hear wind rushing through palm trees again. And then laughter. The scene is foggy at first, and then it comes into sharp focus. I am standing in a kitchen. It's one of those big, well-appointed spaces you see in magazines, but this one is well loved, not just staged. A cake bakes in the oven. Carrot. There are matches and a box of birthday candles at the ready by the stove. Stan Getz's smoky-sweet saxophone filters from a speaker somewhere nearby. I'm stirring a pot of marinara sauce; a bit has splattered onto the marble countertop, but I don't care. I take a sip of wine and sway to the music. A little girl giggles on the sofa. I don't see her face, just her blond ponytail. And then warm, strong arms around my waist as he presses his body against me. I breathe in the scent of rugged spice, fresh cotton, and love. ~ Sarah Jio

Darya Alexandrovna, in a dressing jacket, and with her now scanty, once luxuriant and beautiful hair fastened up with hairpins on the nape of her neck, with a sunken, thin face and large, startled eyes, which looked prominent from the thinness of her face, was standing among a litter of all sorts of things scattered all over the room, before an open bureau, from which she was taking something. Hearing her husband's steps, she stopped, looking towards the door, and trying assiduously to give her features a severe and contemptuous expression. She felt she was afraid of him, and afraid of the coming interview. She was just attempting to do what she had attempted to do ten times already in these last three days - to sort out the children's things and her own, so as to take them to her mother's - and again she could not bring herself to do this; but now again, as each time before, she kept saying to herself, "that things cannot go on like this, that she must take some step" to punish him, put him to shame, avenge on him some little part at least of the suffering he had caused her. She still continued to tell herself that she should leave him, but she was conscious that this was impossible; it was impossible because she could not get out of the habit of regarding him as her husband and loving him. Besides this, she realized that if even here in her own house she could hardly manage to look after her five children properly, they would be still worse off where she was going with them ~ Leo Tolstoy

Laevsky's not loving Nadyezhda Fyodorovna showed itself chiefly in the fact that everything she said or did seemed to him a lie, or equivalent to a lie, and everything he read against women and love seemed to him to apply perfectly to himself, to Nadyezhda Fyodorovna and her husband. When he returned home, she was sitting at the window, dressed and with her hair done, and with a preoccupied face was drinking coffee and turning over the leaves of a fat magazine; and he thought the drinking of coffee was not such a remarkable event that she need put on a preoccupied expression over it, and that she had been wasting her time doing her hair in a fashionable style, as there was no one here to attract and no need to be attractive. And in the magazine he saw nothing but falsity. He thought she had dressed and done her hair so as to look handsomer, and was reading in order to seem clever. ~ Anton Chekhov

You know, there is the intellect, and there is pure feeling - the pure feeling of loving something, of having great, generous emotions. The intellect reasons, calculates, weighs, balances. It asks, "Is it worthwhile? Will it give me benefit?" On the other hand, there is pure feeling - the extraordinary feeling for the sky, for your neighbor, for your wife or husband, for your child, for the world, for the beauty of a tree, and so on. When these two come together, there is death. Do you understand? When pure feeling is corrupted by the intellect, there is mediocrity. That is what most of us are doing. Our lives are mediocre because we are always calculating, asking ourselves whether it is worthwhile, what profit we will get, not only in the world of money, but also in the so-called spiritual world - "If I do this, will I get that? ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

When I was a child, an angel came to say,
A true friend is coming my warrior to sweep you away,
It won't be easy the path because it leads through hell,
But if you're faithful, it will be the greatest story to tell,
You will move God's daughters to a place of hope,
Your story will teach everyone there is nothing they can't cope,
You will suffer a lot, but not one tear will you waste,
Because for all that you do for me, you will be graced,
For I am bringing you someone that wants to travel your trail,
Someone you already met when you passed through heaven's veil,
A warrior, a friend that whispers your heart's song,
Someone that will run with you and pull your spirit along,
Don't you see the timing was love's fated throw,
Because I put you both there to help one another grow,
I am the writer of all great stories your chapters were written by me,
You suffered, you cried because I needed you to see,
That your faith in my ending goes far beyond two,
It was going to change more hearts than both of you knew,
So hush my child and wait for my loving hand,
The last chapter is not written and still in the sand,
It is up to you to finish, before the tide washes it away,
All that is in your heart, I've put there for you to say,
This is not about winning, loss or pain,
I made you the way you are because true love stories are insane,
I wrote you in heaven as I sat on its s ~ Shannon L. Alder

The car was on the FDR drive now and, turning her head, she glanced out at the bleak brown buildings of the projects that stretched for blocks along the drive. Something inside her sank at the sight of all that sameness, and she suddenly felt defeated.
She shifted uncomfortably in her seat. In the past year, she'd started experiencing these moments of desperate emptiness, as if nothing really mattered, nothing was ever going to change, there was nothing new; and she could see her life stretching before her--one endless long day after the next, in which every day was essentially the same. Meanwhile, time was marching on, and all that was happening to her was that she was getting older and smaller, and one day she would be no bigger than a dot, and then she would simply disappear. Poof! Like a small leaf burned up under a magnifying glass in the sun. These feelings were shocking to her, because she'd never experienced world-weariness before. She'd never had time. All her life, she'd been striving and striving to become this thing that was herself--the entity that was Nico O'Neilly. And then, one morning, time had caught up with her and she had woken up and realized that she was there. She had arrived at her destination, and she had everything she'd worked so hard for: a stunning career, a loving (well, sort of) husband, whom she respected, and a beautiful eleven-year-old daughter whom she adored.
She should have been thrilled. But instead, she felt tired. Like all tho ~ Candace Bushnell

No matter what I do on the baseball field, no matter how hard I try to be a good player, no matter how hard I try to be a good father or a good husband, I can never do enough. I can never be perfect in this world. But God's there to tell me that it's not what you do, it's whom you believe in and it's Him loving me. ~ Mark Teixeira

Of course, no china--however intricate and inviting--was as seductive as my fiancé, my future husband, who continued to eat me alive with one glance from his icy-blue eyes. Who greeted me not at the door of his house when I arrived almost every night of the week, but at my car. Who welcomed me not with a pat on the arm or even a hug but with an all-enveloping, all-encompassing embrace. Whose good-night kisses began the moment I arrived, not hours later when it was time to go home. ~ Ree Drummond

Imagine a husband who really loves his wife. He is attentive to her needs. He listens to her heart. He is her best earthly gift. How would she react if he said to her, "Don't ask me for anything. I'm your best gift." When I've said this at our prayer seminars, everyone bursts into laughter. The husband's love for his wife is not disengaged from responding thoughtfully and generously to her requests. If we separate our mundane needs (doing) from God's best gift, his loving presence (being), then we are overspiritualizing prayer. ~ Paul E. Miller

When I was six, my best friend's parents bought him a piano. My mother noticed that every time I would go to his house, the first thing I would say to him was 'Levester' - His name was Levester - I said, 'Levester, can I go play your piano?' So, on my 7th birthday, my parents bought me a piano. ~ Herbie Hancock

And now," he continued, speaking to Milo, "where were you on the night of July 27?"
"What does that have to do with it?" asked Milo.
"It's my birthday, that's what," said the policeman as he entered "Forgot my birthday" in his little book. "Boys always forget other people's birthdays. ~ Norton Juster

And the next day the gondolier came with a train of other gondoliers, all decked in their holiday garb, and on his gondola sat Angela, happy, and blushing at her happiness. Then he and she entered the house in which I dwelt, and came into my room (and it was strange indeed, after so many years of inversion, to see her with her head above her feet!), and then she wished me happiness and a speedy restoration to good health (which could never be); and I in broken words and with tears in my eyes, gave her the little silver crucifix that had stood by my bed or my table for so many years. And Angela took it reverently, and crossed herself, and kissed it, and so departed with her delighted husband.
And as I heard the song of the gondoliers as they went their way
the song dying away in the distance as the shadows of the sundown closed around me
I felt that they were singing the requiem of the only love that had ever entered my heart. ~ W.S. Gilbert

When you're talking to a person, it only matters what they are perceiving. You only need them to perceive you as a loving husband. You don't necessarily need to be one. That's always a good road, if you actually are one. But what people are perceiving will dictate what their life is, and ultimately what your interaction is. ~ Will Smith

During a recent lunch with a close friend who is also the mother of two young children, Diana told of an incident which underlines not only the current state of her relationship with her husband but also the protective nature of her son William. She told her friend that the week that Buckingham Palace decided to announce the separation of the Duke and Duchess of York was understandably a trying time for her. She had lost an amicable companion and was acutely aware that the public spotlight would once again fall on her marriage. Yet her husband seemed unmoved by the furore surrounding the separation. He had spent a week touring various stately homes, gathering material for a book he is writing on gardening. When he returned to Kensington Palace he failed to see why his wife should feel strained and rather depressed. He airily dismissed the departure of the Duchess of York and launched, as usual, into a disapproving appraisal of Diana's public works, especially her visit to see Mother Teresa in Rome. Even their staff, by now used to these altercations, were dismayed by this attitude and felt some sympathy when Diana told her husband that unless he changed his attitude towards her and the job she is doing she would have to reconsider her position. In tears, she went upstairs for a bath. While she was regaining her composure, Prince William pushed a handful of paper tissues underneath the bathroom door. "I hate to see you sad," he said. ~ Andrew Morton

Monsoon Love is a love story with a few comic twists. The idea for this story came to me when I went into the local town of Pokhara with a friend to buy his son a birthday present. We had just arrived at the shops when a heavy down pour began, and as we had arrived on his motorbike and didn't have raincoats or umbrellas so we had to wait for the rain to stop. We were standing under a awning watching the street while we waited, and I noticed this very beautiful young woman walk past me dressed in a t-shirt and jeans with the cuffs rolled half up her legs, but the way she held her umbrella made it impossible to see her face, though with the nice body she had her face must have been just as lovely. Then I though, imagine some guy stuck working in an office, and seeing a view like that every day of the same woman, and falling in love with her despite not seeing her face. ~ Andrew James Pritchard

The widow cries out at the door, The light of my mind has gone out, O my mother, with his death. So cry out, O soul brides of the Husband Lord, and dwell on the Glorious Praises of the True Lord. ~ Guru Nanak

You're going to be a famous artist." His voice is deep velvet - soothing and sure. "You'll live in one of those artsy, upscale apartments in Paris with your rich husband. Oh, who just happens to be a world-renowned exterminator. How's that for a twist of fate? You won't even have to catch your own bugs anymore. That'll give you more time to spend with your five brilliant kids. And I'll come visit every summer. Show up on the doorstep with a bottle of Texas BBQ sauce and a French baguette. I'll be weird Uncle Jeb. ~ A.G. Howard

While the moon smoothly shifted the shadows from one side of Edgewood to the other, Daily Alice dreamed that she stood in a flower-starred field where on a hill there grew an oak tree and a thorn in deep embrace, their branches intertwined like fingers. Far down the hall, Sophie dreamed that there was a tiny door in her elbow, open a crack, through which the wind blew, blowing on her heart. Dr. Drinkwater dreamed he sat before his typewriter and wrote this: 'There is an aged, aged insect who lives in a hole in the ground. One June he puts on his summer straw, and takes his pipe and his staff and his lamp in half his hands, and follows the worm and the root to the stair that leads up to the door into blue summer.' This seemed immensely significant to him, but when he awoke he wouldn't be able to remember a word of it, try as he might. Mother beside him dreamed her husband wasn't in his study at all, but with her in the kitchen, where she drew tin cookie-sheets endlessly out of the oven; the baked things on them were brown and round, and when he asked her what they were, she said 'Years'. ~ John Crowley

My husband travels a lot with his job, so we have a lot of frequent flyer miles so we can hop on a plane with no notice. That's a nice luxury and he is very supportive. ~ Jeri Ryan

He began to trace a pattern on the table with the nail of his thumb. She kept saying she wanted to keep things exactly the way they were, and that she wished she could stop everything from changing. She got really nervous, like, talking about the future. She once told me that she could see herself now, and she could also see the kind of life she wanted to have - kids, husband, suburbs, you know - but she couldn't figure out how to get from point A to point B. ~ Jodi Picoult

The grandmothers decided on William's eighth birthday that the time had come for the boy to learn the value of money. With this in mind, they allocated him one dollar a week as pocket money, but insisted that he keep an inventory accounting for every cent he spent. Grandmother Kane presented him with a green leather-bound ledger, at a cost of 95 cents, which she deducted from his first week's allowance. From then on the grandmothers divided the dollar up every Saturday morning. William could invest 50 cents, spend 20 cents, give 10 cents to charity and keep 20 cents in reserve. At the end of each quarter they would inspect the ledger and his written report on any unusual transactions. ~ Jeffrey Archer

Do you want to marry me?" He touched his forehead to hers. "I do." She wanted to tell him more, but couldn't think of how to word it. He was her accomplice, her boss, her opponent. "I know." He could see it in her eyes, as only he could do. The officiate kept on, the droning words harmonizing with the waves. Mist from the ocean sprinkled over them. "Where there's you, there's always gonna be me. As long as I breathe," Beckett told her. She touched his lips with her fingertips. "I know." The next words came in with another wave. "I now pronounce you husband and wife. Congratulations, Mr. and Mrs. Taylor. ~ Debra Anastasia

Rake," came the succinct reply. "Oh, all right," Lillian grumbled. "I suppose he is a rake. But that may not be an impediment to his courtship of Lady Natalie. Some women like rakes. Look at Evie." Evie continued to snip doggedly through the brocade ribbon, while a smile curved her lips. "I don't l-like all rakes," she said, her gaze on her work. "Just one." Evie, the gentlest and most soft-spoken of them all, had been the one least likely to capture the heart of the notorious Lord St. Vincent, who had been the definitive rake. Although Evie, with her round blue eyes and blazing red hair, possessed a rare and unconventional beauty, she was unbearably shy. And there was the stammer. But Evie also had a reserve of quiet strength and a gallant spirit that seemed to have seduced her husband utterly. "And that former rake obviously adores you beyond reason," Annabelle said. ~ Lisa Kleypas

Oh, all right," she said balefully, beginning to shake all over. "I'll admit it - I want you. There, are you satisfied? I want you."

"In what capacity? Lover, or husband?"

Annabelle stared at him in shock. "What?" His arms slid around her, holding her quivering frame securely against his. He said nothing, only watched her intently as she tried to grasp the implications of the question.

"But you're not the marrying kind," she managed to say weakly. He touched her ear, his fingertip tracing the fragile outer curve. "I've discovered that I am when it comes to you." The subtle caress set fire to her blood, making it difficult to think.

"We would probably kill each other within the first month." "Probably," Hunt conceded, his smiling mouth brushing over her temple. The warmth of his lips sent a rush of dizzying pleasure through her.

"But marry me anyway, Annabelle. As I see things, it would solve most of your problems …and more than a few of mine." His big hand slid gently down her spine, calming her tremors.

"Let me spoil you," he whispered. "Let me take care of you. You've never had anyone to lean on, have you? I've got strong shoulders, Annabelle." A deep laugh rumbled in his chest. "And I may possibly be the only man of your acquaintance who'll be able to afford you. ~ Lisa Kleypas

I'm speechless.I think at the rooftops of Paris.
he touches my cheek,pulling my gaze back to him.I suck in my breath.
"Anna.I'm sorry for what happened in Luxembourg Gardens.Not because of the kiss-I've never had a kiss like that in my life-but because I didn't tell you why I was running away.I chased after Meredith because of you."
Touch me again. Please,touch me again.
"All I could think about was what that bastard did to you last Christmas. Toph never tried to explain or apologize. How could I do that to Mer? And I ought to have called you before I went to Ellie's,but I was so anxious to just end it,once and for all,that I wasn't thinking straight."
I reach for him. "St. Clair-"
He pulls back. "And that.Why don't you call me Etienne anymore?"
"But...no one else calls you that.It was weird.Right?"
"No.It wasn't." His expression saddens. "And every time you say 'St. Clair,' it's like you're rejecting me again."
"I have never rejected you."
"But you have.And for Dave." His tone is venomous.
"And you rejected me for Ellie on my birthday. I don't understand.If you liked me so much,why didn't you break up with her?"
He gazes at the river. "I've been confused. I've been so stupid."
"Yes.You have."
"I deserve that."
"Yes.You do." I pause. "But I've been stupid,too.You were right.About...the alone thing. ~ Stephanie Perkins

TELLING TIME

Before she was old, she took canoe trips in the rain

and buried her passions deep within nature poems.


Ten years before she was old, her husband died

and developers paid a mighty price for their dairy farm.


She knew she was getting old, when rest stops in Iowa

changed over to those crazy automated washrooms.


When she was old, God helped with little things (growing tomatoes in her garden)

but was missing on big ticket items (bringing her husband back).


She knew she had lived too long

when her grandson explained extinction to his stuffed polar bear. ~ Carol Baldwin

I will grant you one wish, for your birthday. Anything at all, except sex."
"Wait…what?"
"You heard me. So what do you want?" Grayson questioned, keeping calm about the whole thing.
Konnor thought those words over in his head again. He was literally telling him he could do what he wanted with him, as a birthday treat, as long as they didn't sleep together.
"Wait a minute. Are you saying that if I wanted to…" he asked, but found that he didn't want to embarrass Grayson by saying it. His eyes went there any way. They focused on his crotch withoutshame, wondering if he would get to remove clothes.
"Yes," he nodded.
"And you'd let me? Why?" he asked, too stunned to do anything else but ask.
"Because it's not your fault I'm straight. And it's not your fault you're attracted to me. If I can't give you everything you want I can at least give you a birthday to remember, right?" Grayson smiled.
Konnor felt like kissing him so hard he wouldn't be straight any more. ~ Elaine White

Feb 6 1945 St. Ann, Jamaica, Daddy was born. I remember us celebrating one of his birthdays in Jamaica at 56 Hope Road with him, no big superstar party, just us kids, Mommy, some cake, few laughs and that was it. Even if he wasn't known to the world on Feb 6th I would still think of him and in my heart say Happy Birthday Daddy. Love. ~ Ziggy Marley

There, as usual, she found her husband asleep in the flickering light of MTV. She knelt by the sofa and laid her hand gently on his chest. "Hey," she whispered. "Who's it gonna be? Me or Pat Benatar?" He stirred, rubbing his eyes with the knuckles of his forefinger. "Well?" she prodded. "I'm thinking. ~ Armistead Maupin