"If it (love) is to save us, we must look at it as clearly as we should learn to look at death. Should love be taught in school? First, term: friendship; second term: tenderness; third term: passion. Why not? They teach kids how to cook and mend cars and fuck one another without getting pregnant; and the kids are, we assume, much better at all of this than we were, but what use is any of that to them if they don't know about love? They're expected to muddle through by themselves. Nature is supposed to take over, like the automatic pilot on an aeroplane. Yet Nature, on to whom we pitch responsibility for all we cannot understand, isn't very good when set to automatic. Trusting virgins drafted into marriage never found Nature had all the answers when they turned out the light."

"..What else can love do? If we're selling it, we'd better point out that it's a starting-point for civic virtue. You can't love someone without imaginative sympathy, without beginning to see the world from another point of view. You can't be a good lover, a good artist or a good politician without this capacity (you can get away with it, but that's not what I mean)."

"..It gives us our humanity, and also our mysticism. There is more to us than us."

"..What is a violin made of? Bits of wood and bits of sheep's intestine. Does its construction demean and banalize the music? On the contrary, it exalts the music further."

Julian Barnes

A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters