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Celebrate the Day with The Quotable Lover

© Sandra Linville

Happy Valentine’s Day!

If today has caught you unawares and you are looking for something just right, consider The Quotable Lover edited by Carol A. Turkington and published by McGraw-Hill.

A book lasts longer than flowers and it has no calories. However, if you want to make a major statement, you could start with roses, present your sweetheart with a tiny box of chocolates, pour the champagne and read aloud all the delicious words in this book between sips and nibbles.

Maybe start with Dorothy L. Sayers who wrote: “And what do all the great words come to in the end, but that? – I love you – I am at rest with you –I have come home.”

Turkington has gathered together an impressive cadre of voices weighing in on the subject of love. It is a diverse lot with quotes from Crown Prince Akihito, Woody Allen, Tallulah Bankhead, Rita Mae Brown, Richard Burton, Nicholas Cage, Italo Calvino, G.K. Chesterton, Quentin Crisp, Andrew Dworkin, Marianne Faithfull, Emma Goldman, Lorraine Hansberry, Hannah More, P.J. O’Rourke, Joe Orton, M. Scott Peck, Marcel Proust, August Strindberg, Gertrude Stein, Thornton Wilder, and so many more.

The quotes are touching, funny, profound, poignant, and passionate. Turkington has organized the quotes in about 170 sections with headings such as: absence, anniversary, beauty, blind love, dreams, foolish love, personal ads, regret, unrequited love and true love. It is a rich and engaging collection. Try a sample of some of the words of love. They speak for themselves.

Some examples of the included quotes:

“I’ve got a heart like a college prom. Each one I dance with seems the best of all.”
Ilka Chase, In Bed We Cry, 1943

“Men always want to be a woman’s first love. That is their clumsy vanity. We women have a more subtle instinct about things. What we like is to be a man’s last romance.”
Oscar Wilde, writing in
A Woman of No Importance, 1893

"My love for you is mixed throughout my body."
Anonymous,
Love Songs of the New Kingdom,1550-1080 B.C.

“A woman
who loves a woman
is forever young"
Anne Sexton,
“Rapunzel,” Transformations,, 1971

“In our life there is a single color, as on an artists’ palette, which provides the meaning of life and art. It is the color of love.”
Marc Chagall,
Newsweek, April 8, 1985

“I’ve had the boyhood thing of being Elvis. Now I want to be with my best friend, and my best friend’s my wife. Who could ask for anything more?”
John Lennon,
Interview on RKO Radio New York, December 8, 1980

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