Sara Dylan in Manhattan, between Second and Third Avenues. Sara had a modeling career and appeared in "Harper's Bazaar" as the 'lovely luscious Sara Lownds'—then became pregnant. Their daughter Maria was born October 21, 1961. Within a year of the birth, the marriage began to fail. Sara started going out on her own, driving around town in an MG sports car Hans had given her, and gravitated to the youthful scene in Greenwich Village. Sometime in early 1964, she met Bob Dylan. Sara was still married to Hans when they met, and Dylan was still romantically linked to Joan Baez at the
Love Minus Zero/No Limit written as a tribute to Dylan's future wife Sara Lownds. The lyrics reflect her Zen-like detachment through a series of opposites, for example, that she "speaks like silence" and is both "like ice" and "like fire". Another famous line from the song also captures this dichotomy: "She knows there's no success like failure, and that failure's no success at all." The first verse of the song has the singer infatuated with the woman, admiring her inner strength. The three remaining verses reflect the inauthentic chaos that the singer has to deal with in the outside world, from which the lover's