Vows, Speech

By Leo Marks

Love and death are both opposites and two sides of the same coin, with one extreme making the other more profound. English cryptographer Leo Marks wrote these beautiful verses in Christmas 1943, just after the death of his girlfriend, Ruth, in a plane crash in Canada. Because it was so obscure, the poem was later used to encrypt messages between Allied spies in France, including Violette Szabo, the heroic British agent who was later captured and killed by the Nazis.

The life that I have Is all that I have And the life that I have Is yours. The love that I have Of the life that I have Is yours and yours and yours. A sleep I shall have A rest I shall have Yet death will be but a pause. For the peace of my years In the long green grass Will be yours and yours and yours.

A good marriage is that in which each appoints the other guardian of his solitude

“It will be the kiss by which all others in your life will be judged... and found wanting.

A man's sexual choice is the result and sum of his fundamental convictions. He will always be attracted to the woman who reflects his deepest vision of himself, the woman whose surrender permits him to experience a sense of self-esteem. The man who is proudly certain of his own value, will want the highest type of woman he can find, the woman he admires, the strongest, the hardest to conquer--because only the possession of a heroine will give him the sense of an achievement