Life & Wisdom Quote by Maya Angelou

Angelou’s line doesn’t dress love up as destiny or reward; it drags it into the realm of biology, chance, and exposure. “Like a virus” is deliberately abrasive. Viruses don’t ask permission, don’t respect status, don’t arrive on a schedule. By borrowing that logic, she strips romance of its usual moral framing - that love happens to the worthy, the ready, the “right” people - and replaces it with a kind of democratic vulnerability. Anybody, anytime: no exemptions, no immunity.

The intent is both comforting and unsettling. Comforting because it releases you from the fantasy that love is a prize you earn through perfection. Unsettling because it denies you control. Angelou often wrote about survival, intimacy, and the costs of being open in a world structured to harden you. In that context, comparing love to infection isn’t cynical; it’s honest about risk. To love is to be penetrated by something you can’t fully regulate, something that alters your internal weather.

There’s subtext here about stigma, too. A “virus” carries the cultural baggage of contagion, panic, even shame - especially in late-20th-century America as public conversations about illness and sexuality grew more politicized. Angelou flips that anxiety into a paradox: what we fear as loss of control is also what makes us human. Love, she suggests, isn’t a curated lifestyle choice. It’s an event - sudden, indiscriminate, and capable of changing your whole body of beliefs.