#wooing

Winning her would be like coaxing a butterfly to land on his hand. Patience, gentleness, and perhaps a prayer or two would be required. ↗

— Mary Jo Putney

#wooing #love

What is wrong with the [tale of] Two Swords?" he asked, even more surprised. "Don't you care for it?" "There is too bloody much romance in it," she said curtly. Ah, well, here was the crux of it, apparently. "Don't you like romance?" he ventured. She looked as though she were trying to decide if she should weep or, as he had earlier predicted, stick him with whatever blade she could lay her, hand on. "I don't know," she said briskly. "I see," he said, though he didn't. He wished, absently, that he'd had at least one sister. He was very well versed in what constituted courtly behavior and appropriate formal wooing practices, thanks to his father's insistence on many such lectures delivered by a dour man whose only acquaintance with women had likely come from reading about them in a book, but he had absolutely no idea how to proceed with a woman whose first instinct when faced with something that made her uncomfortable was to draw her sword. ... "I'll stop provoking you, but I will have the answer to a question. Why do you think most men woo?" "Because they have no sword skill and need something with which to occupy their time? ↗

— Lynn Kurland

#female-fighter #wooing #men

'Healing,' Papa would tell me, 'is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.' ↗

— W. H. Auden

#healing #intuitive #me #nature #papa

One pits his wits against apparently inscrutable nature, wooing her with ardor but nature is blind justice who cannot recognize personal identity. ↗

— Charles Brenton Huggins

#apparently #ardor #blind #cannot #her

Silence is wittier than any jest. Thou wanteth to express thy feelings with eloquence and grace? Drop thy jaw boldly and beautifully. There, thou’rt starting to get it. But hang out thy tongue more. Let the drool strands drip down thy chin and give thy shirt a badge of desire. ‘Thou’rt mine,’ this drool stain says, ‘and I’ll ravish thou if I please…but as of this moment, it doesn’t please me. ↗

— Benson Bruno

#funny #wooing #beauty

No: I shall not marry Samuel Fawthrop Wynne." "I ask why? I must have a reason. In all respects he is more than worthy of you." She stood on the hearth; she was pale as the white marble slab and cornice behind her; her eyes flashed large, dilated, unsmiling. "And I ask in what sense that young man is worthy of me? ↗

— Charlotte Brontë

#courtship #dignity #empowerment #equality #feminism

Yes, faith; it is my cousin's duty to make curtsy and say 'Father, as it please you.' But yet for all that, cousin, let him be a handsome fellow, or else make another curtsy and say 'Father, as it please me. ↗

— William Shakespeare

#courtship #dignity #empowerment #happiness #husbands

Wooing, wedding, and repenting is as a Scotch jig, a measure, and a cinque-pace: the first suit is hot and hasty like a Scotch jig--and full as fantastical; the wedding, mannerly modest, as a measure, full of state and ancientry; and then comes repentance and with his bad legs falls into the cinque-pace faster and faster, till he sink into his grave. ↗

— William Shakespeare

#humor #life #love #marriage #matrimony