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.

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

Missing rubs the soul raw.

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

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.

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.