You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.

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 . . .

If you want to know how much darkness there is around you, you must sharpen your eyes, peering at the faint lights in the distance.

What harbor can receive you more securely than a great library?

...Life is nothing but trading smells.

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.

It's better not to know authors personally, because the real person never corresponds to the image you form of him from reading his books.