"In the dim twilight, I often see pairs of Canada geese on the grass near the parking lot. A large reservoir on the other side of a busy road draws them to this suburban area. Today there are three couples. One of the females is eating grass, and her mate is a few feet away, keeping a vigil, on the lookout for any danger. I watched their interaction. It is minimal in its movements but intense in its awareness, one of the other. When one makes an adjustment, the other notices and immediately makes a compensatory shift. To an insesitive eye, these changes in direction of the body, of the head, might seem random, but I know differently, for this is a couple mated for life, and I had mated for life and had known and experienced as one does when one knows that the marriage is for life that has the shifts and gestures need only be small. The intimacy of the relationship becomes this fine essence, a distillation of the earlier passion, but just as powerful. In the marriage that endures, there is no need for grandiosity."
Sandy Broyard, Standby

"In the course of twenty crowded years one parts with many illusions. I did not wish to lose the early ones.

Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again."
Will Cather, My Anthonia

"Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love."
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace