A Few Longer than Normal Quotes because I'm too Lazy to Write Today

Put a few adults in a room with a sweet-tempered infant, and you may as well leave a tub of butter sitting out in the midday sun. Within moments of crowding around the crib, their grown-up bones begin to soften and their spines to bend. Their eyes mist over with cataracts of pleasure. They misplace intellect and discover new vocal ranges - countertenor, soprano, piglet. And when they happen on the baby's hands, prepare for a variant on the ancient "Ode to the Fingernail." Angier - Woman- An Intimate Geography.
Chosen for its universal truth. This behavior has happened to people through the centuries and it's a passage that should ring bells for everyone who reads it, either from personal experience or observation in others. I can hear the googlie goo's as I read it. Great stuff.

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In the evening after a two or three inch snowfall Daddy and me take our supper in the breakfast room where we can look out the window to where the floodlights shine through the limbs of our apricot and our elm and play off the peaks and drifts against the carshed and just generally make a spectacle of even our back yard...somtimes after midnight and before sunrise it is not at all uncommon for the clouds to blow off, leaving the moon to break through and put a glow on things. Daddy says because the light is extraordinary and unnatural, it inflicts a kind of madness on some people while they sleep and they wake up in the morning wanting to drive their cars. Daddy says he cannot explain it otherwise since there's no reason at all for a townful of people with absolutely nowhere to go to wheel their Buicks and Pontiacs and oversized Fords into the streets of Neely where they pass the day veering off into ditches or phone poles or just running up onto the fenders of people going nowhere in the oppposite direction. Folks only learn enough to use chains about the time the snow has begun to seep off into the ground and slush up in the gutters, and for at least an afternoon and most of an evening, Neely sounds for all the world like a town under armored attack. T.R. Pearson - "A Short History of a Small Place"
Chosen because reading this passage brought back my own snow memories from childhood in a rush, particularly the descriptions of a snowfall at night. Who can read this and not immediately sense that quiet thrill of watching the familiar landmarks of one's backyard slowly evolve into mysterious lumps and crevices, pajama-ed feet itching to be booted and exploring. Snow at night remains one of my favorite memories. We don't seem to have those snowfalls anymore, or did they just seem bigger and more frequent back then?