“Love is an ancient delirium, a desire older than civilization, with taproots stretching deep into dark and mysterious days…..Love, like truth, is the unassailable defense.  Whoever first said  ‘love makes the world go around’ (it was an anonymous Frenchman) probably was not thinking about celestial mechanics, but the way Love seeps into the machinery of Life to keep generation after generation in motion.  We think of love as a positive force that somehow ennobles the one feeling it.”

—Diane Ackerman,  A Natural History of Love