Seaside Love Quotes

Find a woman who makes you feel more alive. She won't make life perfect but she'll make it infinitely more interesting. And then love her with all that's in you.

There is no place like the beach... where the land meets the sea and the sea meats the sky

As I shut the door and started to walk away, I heard him say, "Hey. Sydney." "Yeah?" "You had on a shirt with mushrooms on it, and your hair was pulled back. Silver earrings. Pepperoni slice. No lollipop." I just looked at him, confused. Layla was walking toward us now. "The first time you came into Seaside," he said. "You weren't invisible, not to me. Just so you know.

While I love romance, I’ve never believed in the concept of soul mates, which has always seemed a little like men’s rights activism: not a real thing. Love isn’t immediate or automatic; it takes effort and time and patience. The truth of it was that I’d probably never have the kind of luck with love the women who live in fictional seaside towns do. But sometimes I get this strange feeling, an ache not for something I miss, but for something I’ve never known.

There is an internal landscape, a geography of the soul; we search for its outlines all our lives. Those who are lucky enough to find it ease like water over a stone, onto its fluid contours, and are home. Some find it in the place of their birth; others may leave a seaside town, parched, and find themselves refreshed in the desert. There are those born in rolling countryside who are really only at ease in the intense and busy loneliness of the city. For some, the search is for the imprint of another; a child or a mother, a grandfather or a brother, a lover, a husband, a wife, or a foe. We may go through our lives happy or unhappy, successful or unfulfilled, loved or unloved, without ever standing cold with the shock of recognition, without ever feeling the agony as the twisted iron in our soul unlocks itself and we slip at last into place.

Demetri: It's about the girl I fell in love with. The taffy girl at Seaside. The very beautiful girl that I have to let go of, and it kills me to let go of the girl who stole my heart. A heart I won't ever give back, because it belongs to her now, my best friend.

Everyone has a past. I have mine, you have yours, and we have ours. No matter what it takes, I will prove to you that our past, no matter how hurtful, didn't ruin the future we could have. Only we can either make that happen or run from it. It's our decision this time, Amy. There are no outside influences that can push us one way or the other. There's only you and me and what could be.

Suddenly, in the space of a moment, I realized what it was that I loved about Britain - which is to say, all of it. Every last bit of it, good and bad - Marmite, village fetes, country lanes, people saying 'mustn't grumble' and 'I'm terribly sorry but', people apologizing to me when I conk them with a nameless elbow, milk in bottles, beans on toast, haymaking in June, stinging nettles, seaside piers, Ordnance Survey maps, crumpets, hot-water bottles as a necessity, drizzly Sundays - every bit of it. What a wondrous place this was - crazy as fuck, of course, but adorable to the tiniest degree. What other country, after all, could possibly have come up with place names like Tooting Bec and Farleigh Wallop, or a game like cricket that goes on for three days and never seems to start? Who else would think it not the least odd to make their judges wear little mops on their heads, compel the Speaker of the House of Commons to sit on something called the Woolsack, or take pride in a military hero whose dying wish was to be kissed by a fellow named Hardy? ('Please Hardy, full on the lips, with just a bit of tongue.') What other nation in the world could possibly have given us William Shakespeare, pork pies, Christopher Wren, Windsor Great Park, the Open University, Gardners' Question Time and the chocolate digestive biscuit? None, of course. How easily we lose sight of all this. What an enigma Britain will seem to historians when they look back on the second half of the twentieth century. Here is a country that fought and won a noble war, dismantled a mighty empire in a generally benign and enlightened way, created a far-seeing welfare state - in short, did nearly everything right - and then spent the rest of the century looking on itself as a chronic failure. The fact is that this is still the best place in the world for most things - to post a letter, go for a walk, watch television, buy a book, venture out for a drink, go to a museum, use the bank, get lost, seek help, or stand on a hillside and take in a view. All of this came to me in the space of a lingering moment. I've said it before and I'll say it again. I like it here. I like it more than I can tell you.

I hated that he knew me well enough to know what he was basically asking me to give up. I loved that he was willing to wait for me. And I hated myself even more that I was forcing him to, when I knew my heart was already his for the taking.

I found a tiny starfish In a tide pool by the sand. I found a tiny starfish And I put him in my hand. An itty-bitty starfish No bigger than my thumb, A wet and golden starfish Belonging to no one. I thought that I would take him From the tidepool by the sea, And bring him home to give you A loving gift from me. But as I held my starfish, His skin began to dry. Without his special seaside home, My gift for you would die. I found a tiny starfish In a tide pool by the sea. I hope whoever finds him next Will leave him there, like me! And the gift I've saved for you? The best that I can give: I found a tiny starfish, And for you, I let him live.

In many ways we were what Billy and Ruth Graham called 'happily incompatible'.

We dream in colors borrowed from the seaside

That was the first time I’d said that last bit out loud. Toby Hawthorne loved my mother. She loved him. It had been an epic, seaside kind of love. Literally. Just knowing that made me feel like I’d been lying to myself every time I’d pretended that I didn’t have feelings, that things didn’t have to be messy.

Love is like this amazing, all-consuming force that sneaks up on you and steals all those brain cells that make you think rationally and replaces them with emotions so powerful that you're impotent to change their course.

Sometimes the heart tells us things in whispers, and we miss them. When we’re ready, we hear them loud and clear.

We’re often wrong at predicting who or what will transform us. Encountering certain people, books, music, places, or ideas … at just the right time can immediately make our lives happier, richer, more beautiful, resonant, or meaningful. When it happens, we feel a kind of instant love for them, both deep and abiding. Now and then it can be something as trifling as a children’s book, a returned telephone call, or a night at a seaside bar in Mykonos.

There is an internal landscape, a geography of the soul: we search for its outlines all over our lives. Those who are lucky enough to find it ease like water over stone, onto its fluid contours, and are home. Some find it in a place of their birth; others may leave a seaside town, parched, and find themselves refreshed in the desert. there are those born in rolling countryside who are really only at ease in the intense and busy loneliness of the city. For some, the search is for the imprint of another; a child or a mother, a grandfather or a brother, a lover, a husband, a wife, or a foe. We may go through our lives happy or unhappy, successful or unfulfilled, loved, or unloved, without ever standing cold with the shock or recognition, without ever feeling the agony as the twisted iron in our soul unlocks itself and we slip at last into place.

You may be my new princess. But your mama is my queen.

I want you with me, Amy. Every day, every night, every f*cking minute of my life.

When I was on a book tour last year, I saw a sign in a bookstore in a seaside town in Maine that was carefully drawn with popular symbols of coastal living and these words were entwined: Hope anchors the soul. From that childhood that many might call "disadvantaged," I was anchored in the belief that most things are possible.

Brown eyes, blond hair, I can't help but stare. She's got me hypnotized. I need her, like oxygen, I can't explain the way she makes me feel inside. Like rain, washing my fears away, she makes me feel like I can say all those things I'm too scared to say. Breathe in, breathe out, sometimes you just gotta shout your love. Shout your love. Inhale, exhale, the beauty of your love will always be enough. Enough. Lost, the feeling I have without you. Like I can't function and don't know what to do. It's like I'm dreaming while I'm waking. Like I'm suffocating. Being with her is my addiction, and I don't want to have to stop. No, I never want to stop. Like rain, washing my fears away, she makes me feel like I can say all those things I'm too scared to say. Come back to me. Come back to me. I swear I won't ever leave. I don't think I have it in me. I can't fight, I can't fight. If I did, I would lose, if only it meant I could have you. Cause I need you. Like rain. Like rain. Like rain, washing my fears away.

Language as a Prison The Philippines did have a written language before the Spanish colonists arrived, contrary to what many of those colonists subsequently claimed. However, it was a language that some theorists believe was mainly used as a mnemonic device for epic poems. There was simply no need for a European-style written language in a decentralized land of small seaside fishing villages that were largely self-sufficient. One theory regarding language is that it is primarily a useful tool born out of a need for control. In this theory written language was needed once top-down administration of small towns and villages came into being. Once there were bosses there arose a need for written language. The rise of the great metropolises of Ur and Babylon made a common written language an absolute necessity—but it was only a tool for the administrators. Administrators and rulers needed to keep records and know names— who had rented which plot of land, how many crops did they sell, how many fish did they catch, how many children do they have, how many water buffalo? More important, how much then do they owe me? In this account of the rise of written language, naming and accounting seem to be language's primary "civilizing" function. Language and number are also handy for keeping track of the movement of heavenly bodies, crop yields, and flood cycles. Naturally, a version of local oral languages was eventually translated into symbols as well, and nonadministrative words, the words of epic oral poets, sort of went along for the ride, according to this version. What's amazing to me is that if we accept this idea, then what may have begun as an instrument of social and economic control has now been internalized by us as a mark of being civilized. As if being controlled were, by inference, seen as a good thing, and to proudly wear the badge of this agent of control—to be able to read and write—makes us better, superior, more advanced. We have turned an object of our own oppression into something we now think of as virtuous. Perfect! We accept written language as something so essential to how we live and get along in the world that we feel and recognize its presence as an exclusively positive thing, a sign of enlightenment. We've come to love the chains that bind us, that control us, for we believe that they are us (161-2).

compliment

I’m going to fight for her. I’m going to fight every damn day I have breath in my body, and if I die trying than at least I died loving someone with every part of my soul.

In my dream I drank fully of water, but when I woke, I was thirsty." Ned Low

He hated singing other people's songs. But he was singing some of my favorites...

If you can’t right now, then you let everyone who loves you believe for you.

novels, the Seaside Summers series books are written to stand alone or be enjoyed as part of the larger series,

The events and characters described herein are imaginary and are not

Lay your head on my shoulder. Your heart next to mine,” he whispered. “I’ll take it all. Hear it through.” He pressed a kiss to her temple. “I’ll wrestle your demons, to remain beside you.

But I believe that the grand unifying theory that explains the paradox of tragedy is (like most such theories) deceptively simple: We don’t actually welcome tragedy per se. What we like are sad and beautiful things—the bitter together with the sweet. We don’t thrill to lists of sad words, for example, or slide shows of sad faces (researchers have actually tested this). What we love is elegiac poetry, seaside cities shrouded in fog, spires reaching through the clouds. In other words: We like art forms that express our longing for union, and for a more perfect and beautiful world. When we feel strangely thrilled by the sorrow of “Moonlight Sonata,” it’s the yearning for love that we’re experiencing—fragile, fleeting, evanescent, precious, transcendent love. The idea of longing as a sacred and generative force seems very odd in our culture of normative sunshine. But it’s traveled the world for centuries, under many different names, taking many different forms.

Don’t you understand? The depth of what I feel for you? I’m not just crazy for you, I’m out of my mind, out of my depth, love. You are my life — to leave you would be like leaving a part of myself.

I am in fact a Hobbit (in all but size). I like gardens, trees and unmechanized farmlands; I smoke a pipe, and like good plain food (unrefrigerated), but detest French cooking; I like, and even dare to wear in these dull days, ornamental waistcoats. I am fond of mushrooms (out of a field); have a very simple sense of humour (which even my appreciative critics find tiresome); I go to bed late and get up late (when possible). I do not travel much. I love Wales (what is left of it, when mines, and the even more ghastly sea-side resorts, have done their worst), and especially the Welsh language.

Life is scary as hell, but I’d rather believe you were spared for a reason, maybe so that on your eighteenth birthday you could make a stupid, spoiled, Hollywood actor give up his heart and fall in love.

life is that easy and that complicated. I think I’m sitting in the center of easy and complicated and I don’t know where I’ll end up—but it sure feels like I’m in the right place regardless of if it’s easy or complicated.

more than others see. Be more than others are. You’re too interesting to be single layered. Too many people go through life seeing only what they expect. They view life waiting to be heard, rather than listening and seeing what others do not.

... a tiny room, furnished in early MFI, of which every surface was covered in china ornaments and plaster knick-knacks whose only virtue was that they were small, and therefore of limited individual horribleness. Cumulatively, they were like an infestation. Little vases, ashtrays, animals, shepherdesses, tramps, boots, tobys, ruined castles, civic shields of seaside towns, thimbles, bambis, pink goggle-eyed puppies sitting up and begging, scooped-out swans plainly meant to double as soap dishes, donkeys with empry panniers which ought to have held pin-cushions or perhaps bunches of violets -- all jostled together in a sad visual cacophony of bad taste and birthday presents and fading holiday memories, too many to be loved, justifying themselves by their sheer weight of numbers as 'collections' do.

I fell in love with Leanna Bray’s Seaside friends the second I met them in Read, Write, Love, and it became apparent that they needed a world of their own in which to come alive. The Seaside Summers series is a fun addition to the Love in Bloom series featuring a group of fun,

grief was like a cloud, appearing unexpectedly and stealing your light. A person could try to outrun it, but grief was a very patient competitor, and eventually it always caught up. Dealing with it, accepting the pain and anguish and figuring out how to survive with a different kind of light was the only way to truly move past it.

-I told you: My heart is from another youth My blood, from another sea Do not come close to my shores But do not wander far from my lands For it is in your eyes Alone That I look for the day And on your lips Alone That I look for the rain I give you my island My storms and my tide If you let me moor To your quiet waters And hide under flowers.

I recalled phases of my life by what was on a plate: the crispy baked potatoes on seaside holidays in Devon, the lurid, sticky jam tarts of my tenth birthday, the roast chicken of every Sunday night, bathing the dread of the school week in gravy. No matter how terrible life became, no matter how blistering the pain, I was always sure I’d still have room for seconds.

I finally understand what love is. It isn’t rainbows and butterflies. It isn’t always pretty. Sometimes it’s jagged like broken glass, and sometimes it hurts. But love, the type of love that’s real — the love Demetri has shown me — it’s selfless, it’s persistent. Real love pushes your boundaries, it pulls until you snap, and then when you think you can’t take anymore, it’s

For me, what a single firefly can do is this: it can light a memory I thought was long lost in roadsides overrun with Queen Anne’s lace and goldenrod, a peach pie cooling in the window of a distant house. It might make me feel like I’m traveling again to a gathering of loved ones dining seaside on a Greek island, listening to cicada song and a light wind rustling the mimosa trees. A single firefly might be the spark that sends us back to our grandmother’s backyard to listen for whip-poor-wills; the spark that sends us back to splashing in an ice-cold creek bed, with our jeans rolled up to our knees, until we shudder and gasp, our toes fully wrinkled. In that spark is a slowdown and tenderness. Listen: Boom. Can you hear that? The cassowary is trying to tell us something. Boom. Did you see that? A single firefly is, too. Such a tiny light, for such a considerable task. Its luminescence could very well be the spark that reminds us to make a most necessary turn- a shift and a swing and a switch- toward cherishing this magnificent and wondrous planet. Boom. Boom. You might think of a heartbeat- your own. A child’s. Someone else’s. Or some thing’s heart. And in that slowdown, you might think it’s a kind of love. And you’d be right.

TO THE EAST AND TO THE WEST. To the East and to the West, To the man of the Seaside State and of Pennsylvania, To the Kanadian of the north, to the Southerner I love, These with perfect trust to depict you as myself, the germs are in all men, I believe the main purport of these States is to found a superb friendship, exaltè, previously unknown, Because I perceive it waits, and has been always waiting, latent in all men.

While I love romance, I’ve never believed in the concept of soul mates, which has always seemed a little like men’s rights activism: not a real thing. Love isn’t immediate or automatic; it takes effort and time and patience. The truth of it was that I’d probably never have the kind of luck with love the women who live in fictional seaside towns do. But sometimes I get this strange feeling, an ache not for something I miss, but for something I’ve never known.

We aren't promised tomorrow. We aren't even really promised today, or that next second, or minute that ticks by. We're gifted with moments, each one precious, each one different. So take those moments and use them. Don't let them pass by in anger. Don't let those moments build up into silence between the two of you, because you never know if they'll be taken, and we never know the final number of moments we've been awarded. Let no moment go unused. Let no moments escape where you could have expressed love for one another.

What is this you bring my America? Is it uniform with my country? Is it not something that has been better told or done before? Have you not imported this or the spirit of it in some ship? Is it not a mere tale? a rhyme? a prettiness?—is the good old cause in it? Has it not dangled long at the heels of the poets, politicians, literats, of enemies' lands? Does it not assume that what is notoriously gone is still here? Does it answer universal needs? will it improve manners? Does it sound with trumpet-voice the proud victory of the Union in that secession war? Can your performance face the open fields and the seaside? Will it absorb into me as I absorb food, air, to appear again in my strength, gait, face? Have real employments contributed to it? original makers, not mere amanuenses? Does it meet modern discoveries, calibres, facts, face to face? What does it mean to American persons, progresses, cities? Chi- cago, Kanada, Arkansas? Does it see behind the apparent custodians the real custodians standing, menacing, silent, the mechanics, Manhattanese, Western men, Southerners, significant alike in their apathy, and in the promptness of their love? Does it see what finally befalls, and has always finally befallen, each temporizer, patcher, outsider, partialist, alarmist, infidel, who has ever ask'd any thing of America?

But I believe that the grand unifying theory that explains the paradox of tragedy is (like most such theories) deceptively simple: We don’t actually welcome tragedy per se. What we like are sad and beautiful things—the bitter together with the sweet. We don’t thrill to lists of sad words, for example, or slide shows of sad faces (researchers have actually tested this). What we love is elegiac poetry, seaside cities shrouded in fog, spires reaching through the clouds. In other words: We like art forms that express our longing for union, and for a more perfect and beautiful world. When we feel strangely thrilled by the sorrow of “Moonlight Sonata,” it’s the yearning for love that we’re experiencing—fragile, fleeting, evanescent, precious, transcendent love.

But I believe that the grand unifying theory that explains the paradox of tragedy is (like most such theories) deceptively simple: We don’t actually welcome tragedy per se. What we like are sad and beautiful things—the bitter together with the sweet. We don’t thrill to lists of sad words, for example, or slide shows of sad faces (researchers have actually tested this). What we love is elegiac poetry, seaside cities shrouded in fog, spires reaching through the clouds. In other words: We like art forms that express our longing for union, and for a more perfect and beautiful world. When we feel strangely thrilled by the sorrow of “Moonlight Sonata,” it’s the yearning for love that we’re experiencing—fragile, fleeting, evanescent, precious, transcendent love. The idea of longing as a sacred and generative force seems very odd in our culture of normative sunshine. But it’s traveled the world for centuries, under many different names, taking many different forms. Writers and artists, mystics and philosophers, have long tried to give voice to it. García Lorca called it the “mysterious power which everyone senses and no philosopher explains.

Nothing—and I mean really, absolutely nothing—is more extraordinary in Britain than the beauty of the countryside. Nowhere in the world is there a landscape that has been more intensively utilized—more mined, farmed, quarried, covered with cities and clanging factories, threaded with motorways and railroad tracks—and yet remains so comprehensively and reliably lovely over most of its extent. It is the happiest accident in history. In terms of natural wonders, you know, Britain is a pretty unspectacular place. It has no alpine peaks or broad rift valleys, no mighty gorges or thundering cataracts. It is built to really quite a modest scale. And yet with a few unassuming natural endowments, a great deal of time, and an unfailing instinct for improvement, the makers of Britain created the most superlatively park-like landscapes, the most orderly cities, the handsomest provincial towns, the jauntiest seaside resorts, the stateliest homes, the most dreamily-spired, cathedral-rich, castle-strewn, abbey-bedecked, folly-scattered, green-wooded, winding-laned, sheep-dotted, plumply-hedgerowed, well-tended, sublimely decorated 88,386 square miles the world has ever known—almost none of it undertaken with aesthetics

Nothing – and I mean, really, absolutely nothing – is more extraordinary in Britain than the beauty of the countryside. Nowhere in the world is there a landscape that has been more intensively utilized – more mined, farmed, quarried, covered with cities and clanging factories, threaded with motorways and railway lines – and yet remains so comprehensively and reliably lovely over most of its extent. It is the happiest accident in history. In terms of natural wonders, you know, Britain is a pretty unspectacular place. It has no alpine peaks or broad rift valleys, no mighty gorges or thundering cataracts. It is built to really quite a modest scale. And yet with a few unassuming natural endowments, a great deal of time and an unfailing instinct for improvement, the makers of Britain created the most superlatively park-like landscapes, the most orderly cities, the handsomest provincial towns, the jauntiest seaside resorts, the stateliest homes, the most dreamily spired, cathedral-rich, castle-strewn, abbey-bedecked, folly-scattered, green-wooded, winding-laned, sheep-dotted, plumply hedgerowed, well-tended, sublimely decorated 88,386 square miles the world has ever known – almost none of it undertaken with aesthetics in mind, but all of it adding up to something that is, quite often, perfect. What an achievement that is. And

Let’s say a man really loves a woman; he sees her as his equal, his ally, his colleague; but she enters this other realm and becomes unfathomable. In the krypton spotlight, which he doesn’t even see, she falls ill, out of his caste, and turns into an untouchable. He may know her as confident; she stands on the bathroom scale and sinks into a keening of self-abuse. He knows her as mature; she comes home with a failed haircut, weeping from a vexation she is ashamed even to express. He knows her as prudent; she goes without winter boots because she spent half a week’s paycheck on artfully packaged mineral oil. He knows her as sharing his love of the country; she refuses to go with him to the seaside until her springtime fast is ended. She’s convivial; but she rudely refuses a slice of birthday cake, only to devour the ruins of anything at all in a frigid light at dawn. Nothing he can say about this is right. He can’t speak. Whatever he says hurts her more. If he comforts her by calling the issue trivial, he doesn’t understand. It isn’t trivial at all. If he agrees with her that it’s serious, even worse: He can’t possibly love her, he thinks she’s fat and ugly. If he says he loves her just as she is, worse still: He doesn’t think she’s beautiful. If he lets her know that he loves her because she’s beautiful, worst of all, though she can’t talk about this to anyone. That is supposed to be what she wants most in the world, but it makes her feel bereft, unloved, and alone. He is witnessing something he cannot possibly understand. The mysteriousness of her behavior keeps safe in his view of his lover a zone of incomprehension. It protects a no-man’s-land, an uninhabitable territory between the sexes, wherever a man and a woman might dare to call a ceasefire. Maybe he throws up his hands. Maybe he grows irritable or condescending. Unless he enjoys the power over her this gives him, he probably gets very bored. So would the woman if the man she loved were trapped inside something so pointless, where nothing she might say could reach him. Even where a woman and a man have managed to build and inhabit that sand castle—an equal relationship—this is the unlistening tide; it ensures that there will remain a tag on the woman that marks her as the same old something else, half child, half savage.

Life is strewn with these miracles, for which people who are in love can always hope. It is possible that this one had been artificially brought about by my mother who, seeing that for some time past I had lost all interest in life, may have suggested to Gilberte to write to me, just as, when I was little and went first to the sea-side, so as to give me some pleasure in bathing, which I detested because it took away my breath, she used secretly to hand to the man who was to ‘dip’ me marvellous boxes made of shells, and branches of coral, which I believed that I myself had discovered lying at the bottom of the sea. However, with every occurrence which, in our life and among its contrasted situations, bears any relation to love, it is best to make no attempt to understand it, since in so far as these are inexorable, as they are unlooked-for, they appear to be governed by magic rather than by rational laws. When a multi-millionaire—who for all his millions is quite a charming person—sent packing by a poor and unattractive woman with whom he has been living, calls to his aid, in his desperation, all the resources of wealth, and brings every worldly influence to bear without succeeding in making her take him back, it is wiser for him, in the face of the implacable obstinacy of his mistress, to suppose that Fate intends to crush him, and to make him die of an affection of the heart, than to seek any logical explanation. These obstacles, against which lovers have to contend, and which their imagination, over-excited by suffering, seeks in vain to analyse, are contained, as often as not, in some peculiar characteristic of the woman whom they cannot bring back to themselves, in her stupidity, in the influence acquired over her, the fears suggested to her by people whom the lover does not know, in the kind of pleasures which, at the moment, she is demanding of life, pleasures which neither her lover nor her lover’s wealth can procure for her. In any event, the lover is scarcely in a position to discover the nature of these obstacles, which her woman’y cunning hides from him and his own judgment, falsified by love, prevents him from estimating exactly. They may be compared with those tumours which the doctor succeeds in reducing, but without having traced them to their source. Like them these obstacles remain mysterious but are temporary. Only they last, as a rule, longer than love itself. And as that is not a disinterested passion, the lover who is no longer in love does not seek to know why the woman, neither rich nor virtuous, with whom he was in love refused obstinately for years to let him continue to keep her. Now the same mystery which often veils from our eyes the reason for a catastrophe, when love is in question, envelops just as frequently the suddenness of certain happy solutions, such as had come to me with Gilberte’s letter. Happy, or at least seemingly happy, for there are few solutions that can really be happy when we are dealing with a sentiment of such a kind that every satisfaction which we can bring to it does no more, as a rule, than dislodge some pain. And yet sometimes a respite is granted us, and we have for a little while the illusion that we are healed.

Chocolate didn’t make stupid decisions. Chocolate didn’t ask questions. Chocolate was the perfect companion.

renovating the artist’s studio that sat nestled among a grouping of trees on the far side of the property. Initially, Kurt thought he might use the studio as a writing retreat separate from where he lived, with the idea that leaving the cottage to work might give him a chance to actually have a life and not feel pressure to write twenty-four-seven. What he found was that the studio was too far removed from the sights and sounds that inspired him, and it made him feel like even

In a letter written to the play's director, Peter Wood, on 30th March 1958, just before the start of rehearsals, Pinter rightly refused to add extra lines explaining or justifying Stanley's motives in withdrawing from the world into a dingy seaside boarding-house: 'Stanley cannot perceive his only valid justification - which is he is what he is - therefore he certainly can never be articulate about it.' But Pinter came much closer than he usually does to offering an explanation of the finished work: We've agreed: the hierarchy, the Establishment, the arbiters, the socio- religious monsters arrive to affect censure and alteration upon a member of the club who has discarded responsibility (that word again) towards himself and others. (What is your opinion, by the way, of the act of suicide?) He does possess, however, for my money, a certain fibre - he fights for his life. It doesn't last long, this fight. His core being a quagmire of delusion, his mind a tenuous fuse box, he collapses under the weight of their accusation - an accusation compounded of the shit- stained strictures of centuries of 'tradition'. This gets us right to the heart of the matter. It is not simply a play about a pathetic victim brainwashed into social conformity. It is a play about the need to resist, with the utmost vigour, dead ideas and the inherited weight of the past. And if you examine the text, you notice how Pinter has toughened up the original image of the man in the Eastbourne digs with 'nowhere to go'. Pinter's Stanley Webber - a palpably Jewish name, incidentally - is a man who shores up his precarious sense of self through fantasy, bluff, violence and his own manipulative form of power-play. His treatment of Meg initially is rough, playful, teasing: he's an ersatz, scarpegrace Oedipus to her boardinghouse Jocasta. But once she makes the fateful, mood-changing revelation - 'I've got to get things in for the two gentlemen' - he's as dangerous as a cornered animal. He affects a wanton grandeur with his talk of a European concert tour. He projects his own fear on to Meg by terrorising her with stories of nameless men coming to abduct her in a van. In his first solo encounter with McCann, he tries to win him over by appealing to a shared past (Maidenhead, Fuller's tea shop, Boots library) and a borrowed patriotism ('I know Ireland very well. I've many friends there. I love that country and I admire and trust its people... I think their policemen are wonderful'). At the start of the interrogation he resists Goldberg's injunction to sit down and at the end of it he knees him in the stomach. And in the panic of the party, he attempts to strangle Meg and rape Lulu. These are hardly the actions of a supine victim. Even though Stanley is finally carried off shaven, besuited, white-collared and ostensibly tamed, the spirit of resistance is never finally quelled. When asked how he regards the prospect of being able to 'make or break' in the integrated outer world, he does not stay limply silent, but produces the most terrifying noises.

Tell me something about you I don’t know.” “Heavens, Nathaniel, I’m sure you know everything.” “I do not.” He rested his elbow on his one raised knee, while the other leg folded underneath it. “If I did, then I would have known all about the infamous James Pigley, so I must assume there are more secrets to you that need discovering.” “Secrets?” Her voice cracked. Chest heaving, she turned away. Did he have to use such a word? She struggled to find something within her stalled mind to ease the suffocating silence.  “Come now Kitty, don’t play coy with me.” Nathaniel’s inviting timbre woke her from the shadows. The playful glint in his face pulled a full smile from her lips when he continued. “Here is what I know of Miss Katherine Campbell formerly of Boston. She enjoys Shakespeare and is a gifted cook. I know she is fascinated with medicine and I know her political standings. She loves God and family...” He grinned wider, a gentle kind of grin that sparkled in his eyes. “But I desire to know more.” The warmth in his stare eased around Kitty as real as if it had been an embrace, soothing away the tension that clung to her neck and shoulders. She leaned one hand on the ground and rested against it. “You’re very kind, Nathaniel, but I don’t know what to tell. I’m quite ordinary.” “Ordinary? I should say not.” Nathaniel reached for a small stick and played with it in his fingers before he snapped it in half and tossed the pieces in the water. He cast his eyes her direction and glared playfully. “No matter. If you choose to be so demure then I shall ask questions. Do you enjoy the ocean?” “Aye, the seaside is very calming, but I don’t care for boats.” He nodded with his lips pursed in thought. “I’ll keep that in mind. Do you play an instrument?” “Nay, much to my mother’s disappointment.” She sighed and looked heavenward with a tiny laugh, remembering the hours of practice that produced embarrassingly little results. Kitty sat up and hugged her knees. “Do you enjoy reading?”  Nathaniel scowled. “This conversation isn’t supposed to be about me.” “Well, do you?” She grinned wider. He shook his head with a disapproving lift to his brow, but the smoldering grin expressed his merriment. “I enjoy reading. Especially Milton.” “Milton? I adore Milton.

Benvenuta a la Via dell’Amore,” he says, poking a bright pink lock with Ashlee + Jake written on it in white paint. “What are all the locks for?” “Do you know the history of la Via dell’Amore?” I know a little, but I’d rather hear it from him, so I shake my head and he continues. “When this path between Riomaggiore and Manarola was not here, many people did not marry outside of their own village. But with the, ah, connection to the next village, love was exciting again. Lovers walked along the seaside here to meet with one another.” I take in the view as we stroll the crowded path. High cliffs stretch up to our right, with sections of loose rock held down by wire mesh, padlocks hooked onto every wire within reaching distance. To our left, the Ligurian Sea--clear and bright, blue and green--glimmers in the afternoon sun. Fishing boats and passenger ferries race along the coast. The temptation to take pictures of every detail around me is strong, but that would require letting go of Bruno’s hand, and I’m not sure I want to just yet. I’m curious to see how long he’ll hold it. “The locks are for the tourists, a symbol of love for all to see, for the eternity. Until they are cut down.” I gape at him. “Cut down?” He laughs. “Si. This path would be nothing but locks if they were not taken away.

What is it about the Greek character that has allowed this complex culture to thrive for millennia? The Greek Isles are home to an enduring, persevering people with a strong work ethic. Proud, patriotic, devout, and insular, these hardy seafarers are the inheritors of working methods that are centuries old. On any given day, fishermen launch their bots at dawn in search of octopi, cuttlefish, sponges, and other gifts of the ocean. Widows clad in black dresses and veils shop the local produce markets and gather in groups of two and three to share stories. Artisans stich decorative embroidery to adorn traditional costumes. Glassblowers, goldsmiths, and potters continue the work of their ancient ancestors, ultimately displaying their wares in shops along the waterfronts. The Greeks’ dedication to time-honored occupations and hard work is harmoniously complemented by their love of dance, song, food, and games. Some of the earliest works of art from the Greek Isles--including Minoan paintings from the second millennium B.C.E.--depict the central, day-to-day role of dance, and music. Today, life is still lived in common, and the old ways often survive in a deep separation between the worlds of women and men. In the more rural areas, dancing and drinking are--officially at least--reserved for men, as the women watch from windows and doorways before returning to their tasks. At seaside tavernas throughout the Greek Isles, old men sip raki, a popular aniseed-flavored liqueur, while playing cards or backgammon under grape pergolas that in late summer are heavy with ripe fruit. Woven into this love of pleasure, however, are strands of superstition and circumspection. For centuries, Greek artisans have crafted the lovely blue and black glass “eyes” that many wear as amulets to ward off evil spirits. They are given as baby and housewarming gifts, and are thought to bring good luck and protect their wearers from the evil eye. Many Greeks carry loops of wooden or glass beads--so-called “worry beads”--for the same purpose. Elderly women take pride in their ability to tell fortunes from the black grounds left behind in a cup of coffee.

SEASIDE WAS A small community of one-, two-, and three-bedroom cottages, most of which had been owned by the same families for decades. Leanna’s grandfather had purchased their cottage before she was born. Her family had spent a few weeks each summer at the cottage, and during their visits, her parents kept them on the go. Between afternoons at the beach, walking through quaint nearby towns, and evening family-oriented concerts, it left little downtime, and the downtime they’d enjoyed had been spent at Seaside. She was glad for the friendships she’d fostered in the community and even more pleased that they’d lasted this long. She couldn’t imagine her summers without her Seaside friends.

It’s lovely to go away, but it’s even more wonderful to come home.

Oh no, dear, you’re far too lovely for that. You’ll be the kindly one. They’ll be terrified of you because I’ll spread rumours about you having once killed a man with a pen, but you’ll be winsome and agreeable.’ ‘It was a mechanical pencil and he was trying to shoot you.’ ‘Nevertheless, they’ll be adoring but wary.

She usually loved snowy days. Especially during this more leisurely time in her life when events and appointments were seldom urgent.

The azaleas were so different, foreign creatures entirely, to the Scottish heather and bluebells of his life before. But he was haunted by visions of a black-haired beauty with skin the color of clay and strong, calloused hands bending her nose to the heather, gathering up heaping armfuls of bluebells and putting them in earthen pots around a tiny, seaside cottage. Of that same woman stuffing a mattress with heather so that whenever he’d rolled over, whenever she’d shifted closer, whenever he’d thrust deeply into her body, into her heat, he’d smelled heather. She would love the azaleas. She would love the magnolias and camellias and dogwoods. She would love the sticky heat and the way the air always smelled—Spanish moss and flowers and, underneath it all, decay. She would smell everything—things that no one else could smell. He used to tease her that he needn’t bother with dogs because she could scent dinner for them. And she’d laughed but would go out and come back with a fat rabbit dangling by the ears just the same.

Look at Maggie. She doesn’t pretend she doesn’t have holes in her heart….But she still has beauty and joy and love in her life. She’s figured out how to live in the tension between honest heartache and steadfast hope. She’s put her trust in a God who…who maybe doesn’t make every crack disappear, but who holds all her broken pieces tenderly. Who heals her simply by being with her. Staying with her.

Even though, my heartfelt heavy meaning of life is unsure, I sat on the pebble at the seaside sending love out to you and the world

midnight

It’s nice for me. Sometimes I feel like I’m forcing myself on him.” She smiled, like she completely understood. “That’s what being a teenager is all about. They’re confused as hell, so it’s only natural for their parents to be confused, too. I say, give them rope. Tug them in when they need it, and give ’em more rope when they earn it. If they don’t hang themselves, you’ve done well. If they do, then you probably still did well, but you missed a hint of trouble along the way.” She set the frame back on the mantel and looked at the others. When she continued, her tone was serious but cushioned with compassion. “What’s most important is that if you did miss something, you don’t leave him hanging until his eyes pop out and he can’t find his way back. You lift him up by the bootstraps and kick him in the ass—figuratively, not literally. Walk with him down a better path. Give him the tools he needs and the understanding to become a better person. Teach yourself to become a better parent; then you both move forward together. A little bruised, a little embarrassed, but whole.

Let’s go, sugar pop. I’ve got a bottle of Middle Sister with our name on it.

Don’t be sorry for feeling something. That’s the world’s great separator—those who feel and react to their feelings and those who cower from them.

Love is the foundation of strength in a family.

In your eyes I found myself.

if there’s one thing I know about this world, it’s that all we’ve got is who we are. So don’t you ever stop being too you.

You have the only thing I want—your heart.

kissed

He couldn't allow himself to give the warning a second thought. Second thoughts led to doubt, and doubt led to carelessness, which in turn would likely lead him to exactly what gave him the second thought in the first place

I want to love you and be loved by you.

I want to stand in that skycap and look out at the land below with you right there by my side—and one day with our children, if you’re willing—and create our own history. I want to wake up with you in my arms and know that at the end of the day, you’re right there with me, sharing our headaches and celebrating the best times in our lives. I want to grow old with you

I no longer know how to be me without you.

I really wanted to go chunky-dunking tonight.” Chunky-dunking is what Bella and her friends called skinny-dipping.

Without his phone, he seemed to breathe easier, and Bella realized, she thought that held true for most people.

Sun drifts, moon breaches, cool air whispers into the night. Tears fall, arms comfort, birds in the distance take flight. Waning crescent, smother my cries, take me up to the inky skies.” She

Did you know that without rosin, the bow slides across the cello strings and makes a faint whispery sound, or no sound at all? It’s the rosin that provides the friction in order to produce sound when it’s pulled across the strings. Before you, Jamie, I was whispering through life. With you, I’m whole. I’m melodious and tuneful. Pure musicality.” She smiled up at him. “You’re my rosin, Jamie.

keeping his career, he’d thrown himself into surfing and training and tried

Sometimes love can’t be deserved or measured — it can’t be earned. It just is.

You are my little girl. I love you so much. I would do anything for you. You are mine. Do you understand, Natalee? You are my flesh and blood and there is nothing on this Earth that is more important to me.

They then interviewed us, asking about our love of Qingdao, how we met, why we came. Having learned quickly what they wanted to hear, we answered with the obligatory enthusiasm. Patrick, in especially fine form, waxed the kind of cheesy poetic that put yen-signs in the eyes of the producers. On a seaside boardwalk, for example, they asked him a simple question about the appeal of Qingdao to which he replied with a philosophical metaphor on what he lovingly dubbed, “The Qingdao Mist,” a euphemism for the constant polluted haze that enveloped the city. He compared it to the dreamlike state of early love, when all landscapes are a pleasant blur of fuzzy details. I, trying not to laugh, vented my amusement in a wide, photographic smile.

Love isn’t about having all the answers. It’s about not caring if you don’t, because what happiness really comes down to is knowing that you don’t need answers if your heart is full of the person you cherish most.

You’re the first thing I think of when I wake up and the last thing I think of before I fall asleep.

kissed her cheek and

That is just what baby did not know, and in spite of the kiss, he made up his mind to cry. It was very distressing. Christie walked up and down in the bit of a space, and cuddled the poor fellow, and whispered loving words to him, and cooed a lullaby in to his ear, but he would have none of them. He wanted just one thing, and that was his mother’s face. The gentlemen began to interest themselves in the matter, though the velvet-dressed young lady was still deep in her Seaside Library, only taking time to dart a frown at baby for being so noisy. One and another asked who had been with the child, and what had become of her; and Wells told his story about seeing her leave the car at the last station. “A case of desertion,” said one man, looking severely at Christie as though she might be the cause; but she looked back at him out very cross eyes, and was glad that she did. The idea of any mother deserting her baby!

ending

Labworth Beach Cafe,

mother

strings of performing that had bound her for so many years. She had time for friends, like the girls at the pool, or Vera, whom she was sure she could talk to for hours.

Juilliard,

Winter's coming in the air tonight Feel it blowing off the park But that don't mean that we can't take a ride 60 miles to Seaside Heights I do the same old thing again, because it don't feel old There's no need to reinvent, you’re sensational Poetry in motion, swinging with your saxophone in the rain What's this devotion? I've never felt love, not from pain Bodies or oceans, you fill mine up with your right rain Because you're like, poetry in motion Sippin' on your martini in the band What’s this devotion? You really seem like a good man Bodies or oceans, I cling to you like your mainland Winter's coming in the air tonight Feel it blowin' off the park But that don't mean that we can't take a ride 60 miles to Seaside Heights I want the same old thing again, 'cause it don't feel old That there's no need to reinvent you, you're sensational You're poetry in motion, swinging with your saxophone in the rain What's this devotion? I never felt love, not from pain Bodies or oceans, you lift mine up with your right rain Because you're like poetry in motion Sippin' on your martini in the band What’s this devotion? You really feel like a good man Bodies or oceans, mhm On the cover of life is a picture of a man Just like she's alive again, and everyone Doesn't matter if you're a One, two, three Because you're like poetry in motion Swinging with your saxophone in the bar What's this devotion? Built with metal and with guitar Bodies or oceans, wash over all my scars, Because you're like poetry in motion Swingin' with your martini in the band What's this emotion? You really seem like a good man Bodies or oceans, I cling to you like your mainland

She stripped off the leather coat she’d worn to bridge, and he hung it on an elaborate yet unique coat tree next to some built-in bookshelves that were so extensive his living room almost resembled a library—at least on that side. Ariana guessed he’d put them where the staircase used to be. The new staircase was made of wrought iron and was no longer against the wall. “I love your shelves,” she said. “Thanks. I built them myself.

Staring at you and knowing something is missing but not knowing how to give it back...

How about a picture?" he said, winding on the spool of film. "A little memento of your seaside rendezvous, Miss Smitham?" She perked up, just as he'd hoped she would- Dolly loved having her photograph taken- and Jimmy glanced about for the sun's position. He walked to the far side of the small field in which they'd had their picnic. Dolly had pushed herself up to a sitting position and was stretching like a cat. "Like this?" she said. Her cheeks were flushed from the sun, her bow lips plump and red from the strawberries he'd bought at a roadside stall. "Perfect," he said, and she really was.