I had fallen in love. What I mean is: I had begun to recognize, to isolate the signs of one of those from the others, in fact I waited for these signs I had begun to recognize, I sought them, responded to those signs I awaited with other signs I made myself, or rather it was I who aroused them, these signs from her, which I answered with other signs of my own . . .

So began their love, the boy happy and amazed, she happy and not surprised at all (nothing happens by chance to girls). It was the love so long awaited by Cosimo and which had now inexplicably arrived, and so lovely that he could not imagine how he had even thought it lovely before. And the thing newest to him was that it was so simple, and the boy at that moment thought it must be like that always.

Nobody looks at the moon in the afternoon, and this is the moment when it would most require our attention, since its existence is still in doubt.

Today each of you is the object of the other’s reading, one reads in the other the unwritten story.

It is only after you have come to know the surface of things ... that you can venture to seek what is underneath. But the surface of things is inexhaustible.

A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.

Each new Clarice, compact as a living body with its smells and its breath, shows off, like a gem, what remains of the ancient Clarices, fragmentary and dead.