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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.