There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket ? safe, dark, motionless, airless ? it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.

Yet, it had been Dimitri's gentleness and thoughtfulness mixed with that deadliness that made him so wonderful. The same hands that wielded stakes with such precision would carefully brush the hair out of my face. The eyes that could astutely spot any danger in the area would regard me wonderingly and worshipfully, like I was the most beautiful and amazing woman in the world.

"I found him carefully studying me, his lips in a thin line. "Has anyone ever taken care of you?" he asked quietly.

"Watch carefully

I want YOU to be the one wanting me first. Pushing me first. Kissing me first. Don't be careful with me," he said. "Because I won't be careful with you.

Let me tell you about love, that silly word you believe is about whether you like somebody or whether somebody likes you or whether you can put up with somebody in order to get something or someplace you want or you believe it has to do with how your body responds to another body like robins or bison or maybe you believe love is how forces or nature or luck is benign to you in particular not maiming or killing you but if so doing it for your own good. Love is none of that. There is nothing in nature like it. Not in robins or bison or in the banging tails of your hunting dogs and not in blossoms or suckling foal. Love is divine only and difficult always. If you think it is easy you are a fool. If you think it is natural you are blind. It is a learned application without reason or motive except that it is God. You do not deserve love regardless of the suffering you have endured. You do not deserve love because somebody did you wrong. You do not deserve love just because you want it. You can only earn - by practice and careful contemplations - the right to express it and you have to learn how to accept it. Which is to say you have to earn God. You have to practice God. You have to think God-carefully. And if you are a good and diligent student you may secure the right to show love. Love is not a gift. It is a diploma. A diploma conferring certain privileges: the privilege of expressing love and the privilege of receiving it. How do you know you have graduated? You don't. What you do know is that you are human and therefore educable, and therefore capable of learning how to learn, and therefore interesting to God, who is interested only in Himself which is to say He is interested only in love. Do you understand me? God is not interested in you. He is interested in love and the bliss it brings to those who understand and share the interest. Couples that enter the sacrament of marriage and are not prepared to go the distance or are not willing to get right with the real love of God cannot thrive. They may cleave together like robins or gulls or anything else that mates for life. But if they eschew this mighty course, at the moment when all are judged for the disposition of their eternal lives, their cleaving won't mean a thing. God bless the pure and holy. Amen.

Oh lovers! be careful in those dangerous first days! once you've brought breakfast in bed you'll have to bring it forever, unless you want to be accused of lovelessness and betrayal.

"And he leans in, so carefully. Breathing

Be careful of love. It'll twist your brain around and leave you thinking up is down and right is wrong.

I don't trust people who don't love themselves and tell me, 'I love you.' ... There is an African saying which is: Be careful when a naked person offers you a shirt.

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.

My truth - what I believe - is that there are no answers here and if you are looking for answers you'd better choose the question carefully.

The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact. Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity every crack in the common front against fascism.

While eschewing emotion - and its companion vulnerability - Obama should be careful not to sacrifice empathy the 'I feel your pain' connection that sustained Clinton. This connection is the shorthand people use to measure their leaders' intentions. If people believe you're on their side they will trust your decisions.

A careful inspection showed them that even if they succeeded in righting it by themselves the cart would travel no longer. The axles were in a hopeless state and the missing wheel was shattered into pieces.

I've got tapes that I'm so thankful that my father made - old reel-to-reel tapes. I've got a ton of those things at home. He kept those like fine diamonds I mean he kept them you know in a box and was very very careful of them you know.

I try to be careful because technology changes so much over the years. But some things don't change. Kids and parents have disagreements kids try to manipulate parents try to sit down with rules and regs. That part never changes.

It would appear that we have reached the limits of what it is possible to achieve with computer technology although one should be careful with such statements as they tend to sound pretty silly in 5 years.

When I was 40 my doctor advised me that a man in his 40s shouldn't play tennis. I heeded his advice carefully and could hardly wait until I reached 50 to start again.

Apart from the fact that your physical ability starts to decline I also think someone in their fifties being childlike becomes a little sad. You've got to be careful.

But I have tried to go over it very carefully not merely what the evidence is but with psychoanalysts and psychologists and I think we're just about all agreed that Lincoln and Speed did not have a homosexual relationship.

Then there is the further question of what is the relationship of thinking to reality. As careful attention shows thought itself is in an actual process of movement.

My grandmother always told me you must keep to your old roads and stick to your original friends and just go through smooth be careful and stay positive.

So I had to be careful. I recognized the responsibility that whether I liked it or not I had to accept whatever the obligation was. That was to behave in a manner to carry myself in such a professional way as if there ever is a reflection it's a positive one.