Making love carried me as close to the center of awe as anything I'd ever experienced. It gathered into one fearsome rapture all my earlier transports of terrified wonder — from thunderstorms to starry nights, from the chill brink of death to the dawn chorus of waking birds. . . . For lovers do not so much make love as they are remade by love — dipped into the fire, melted down, reshaped. If they are devoted to one another, love will transform them, dissolving the shells of their old separate selves and making them anew.
— Scott Russell Sanders, A Private History of Awe