SARAH DUNANT

But anyone who has been that young knows that the great grief of love is that your body feels the most when it knows the least.

Sometimes history reads like a catalogue of post-traumatic stress.

Ah, he has too many ideas, that man da Vinci. His mind works faster than his hands.

Someone told me much later that you always know the people who are going to make a difference in your life, from the very first time you set eyes on them, even if you do not like them at all. And I had noticed him, as he had me. God help us.

I listen to people talking sometimes, that great river that is language, with all its undercurrents of grammar and nuance, and I wonder how we all learn so quickly to speak it, given that we begin when we are barely old enough to stand upright. I have no memory of finding it hard. Indeed, I have no memory of it at all.

The Devil may take the reckless, but the good will surely die of boredom. Boredom and frustration.

Missing rubs the soul raw.

Obsessed? I don't know what the word means. I know there were times when I couldn't think of anything else. I used to stay in every weeknight in the hope that he might get free and call me. It felt like I had a disease I didn't want to get rid of. I suppose that's a definition of obsession, yes.

If grace belongs to God, there are those who say that luck belongs to the Devil and that he looks after his own.

Together he [Girolamo Savonarola] and his archenemy Lorenzo [de' Medici] would have been the stuff of gargoyles. One could almost imagine the diptych in which their profiles confronted each other, their noses as powerful as their personalities.

Sometimes history reads like a catalogue of post-traumatic stress.

Obsessed? I don't know what the word means. I know there were times when I couldn't think of anything else. I used to stay in every weeknight in the hope that he might get free and call me. It felt like I had a disease I didn't want to get rid of. I suppose that's a definition of obsession, yes.

If grace belongs to God, there are those who say that luck belongs to the Devil and that he looks after his own.

I listen to people talking sometimes, that great river that is language, with all its undercurrents of grammar and nuance, and I wonder how we all learn so quickly to speak it, given that we begin when we are barely old enough to stand upright. I have no memory of finding it hard. Indeed, I have no memory of it at all.

Someone told me much later that you always know the people who are going to make a difference in your life, from the very first time you set eyes on them, even if you do not like them at all. And I had noticed him, as he had me. God help us.

Missing rubs the soul raw.

But anyone who has been that young knows that the great grief of love is that your body feels the most when it knows the least.

Ah, he has too many ideas, that man da Vinci. His mind works faster than his hands.

Together he [Girolamo Savonarola] and his archenemy Lorenzo [de' Medici] would have been the stuff of gargoyles. One could almost imagine the diptych in which their profiles confronted each other, their noses as powerful as their personalities.

So if we could not have love, my husband and I, then at least I could have alchemy.

The Devil may take the reckless, but the good will surely die of boredom. Boredom and frustration.