DIRTY DIAMOND INDUSTRY: Quote of the Week -- Courtesy of Journalist Tom Zoellner

This one comes from Zoellner's brilliant book, "The Heartless Stone: a journey through the world of diamonds, deceit, and desire." We'll be talking to him later in the week.

"In the face of a baffling universe, and with the foreknowledge of certain death, is it any wonder that the mind gravitates toward something claiming to be eternal that we can grasp in our hands? When it came to professions of love, man's quest for meaning had lit upon a rock. De Beers had supplied a mythology to lead us there. We crave the thing that is said to be the hardest to find, that raises us over everyone else in a twinkling, as if to emphasize the emotional poverty of ordinary life. A diamond is the thing set apart, a heart outside of the heart, the one shining irreducible moment in clear carbon that is supposed to make us forget our failings and mortality. From the river mines and battlefields of Central Africa to the suffocating polishing factories of India and the Arctic camps and Siberian labs where men and women risked their lives in pursuit of the star that stands for love, they all bent to serve the myth around which we wound our hungry dreams."

Wooooo . . .

(Photo from flickr.)