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Wednesday, October 09, 2013

Popping the Question

“The most important thing to remember is this: To be ready at any moment to give up what you are for what you might become.”

― W.E.B. Du Bois
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Some proposals are perhaps better forgotten. The following unromantic, bizarre, poorly delivered or conceived proposals elicit reactions less like Molly Bloom’s orgasmically affirmative “Yes I will yes I will yes!” and more like this underwhelmed response to a lackluster offer in David Stacton’s A Fox Inside: “You might at least pretend…that I’m a person. After all, I move and talk like one the best way I can.” A Survey of Literature’s Non-Traditional Marriage Proposals

"It is the beginning of the end when you discover you have style."
~Dashiell Hammett (interview,Washington Daily News, March 1956)