"What solidity of sentiment it takes not to let an awareness of the moment's impermanence dilute its richness, its sweetness, but purify it and satur… - Maria Popova

This false notion of the body as the testing ground for intimacy has long warped our understanding of what constitutes a romantic relationship. The measure of intimacy is not the quotient of friction between skin and skin, but something else entirely — something of the love and trust, the joy and ease that flow between two people as they inhabit that private world walled off from everything and everyone else.

... the most significant event of her intellectual and emotional development arrived the way most transformative things enter out lives — through the back door of the mansion of our plans.

I was learning about it along the way, often through reading, often from people and ideas marginalized by culture, erased by the collective selective memory we call history