Quotes from Marilyn Yalom

In France, you have 900 years of romantic love going back to the troubadours and minstrels that wrote stories of Lancelot and Guinevere. You have gallantry at the highest level.

There is a belief that love has its own justification, that it should be experienced as passionately as possible. The French have a wonderful expression, amour passion, which is the ultimate.

For a French person, lack of desire in someone is really seen as a defect.

At some level of consciousness, all lovers know this. If you cease to care for the person you love, you will give up a vital piece of your identity. You will become someone else. You will look back on your past love with tenderness or anger or some other combination of feelings, but you will not be able to recapture the same emotions you once felt.

born to avenge my sex and dominate yours

neuropsychiatrist Louann Brizendine, The Female Brain and The Male Brain, which point out that a man has two and a half times as much brain space devoted to sexual pursuit as a woman, while the female brain's empathy system is considerably more active than the male's.3)

For all the philosophical treatises and for all the assurances of the medical profession, there is no cure for the simple fact that we must leave each other.

true love cannot extend its claims to spouses.

Friendship matters, especially in old age, when death reduces the number of one's friends.

Our history suggests that women will continue to show the world how to be friends.

Unlike their southern counterparts, northern minstrels emphasized a love of longing rather than fulfillment.

Like her spiritual ancestor William IX of Aquitaine, the Comtesse de Die made no pretense that love existed without voluptuous intimacy.

Whenever men appeared in breast stories, they were usually on the receiving, rather than the giving end.