Quotes from Sarah Dunant

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

Ambassadors, of course, do not blush. It is a requisite of the job that they can sustain any manner of insult without any visible change at all to their face.

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

There is more glory in peace than in war

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 you love a man for his honesty, you cannot become angry when he shows it.

She has never liked sleeping alone. Even as a small child, she would steel herself to brave the black soup of the room as far as her brother's bed, creeping in beside him. And he, who when awake would rather fight than talk, would put his arms around her and stroke her hair until their warmness mingled and she fell asleep.

Either you're standing under your halos, eyes up to heaven, or you're munching apples in their faces and flashing your bush. I'm not even sure they know which they prefer. The best you can do is choose when you change your costume.

Any man in love with Cesare is already half in love with his sister.

She is only a young woman who did not want to become a nun. The world is full of them.

Birth, coupling, death. The more she thinks about it, the more it seems that that is all there is: a wheel turning over and over, moving so fast that sometimes you cannot even make out the spokes. It is a wonder there is any room for poetry.

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, such was the sound that the chorus made together, that to have been a part of it at all was enough for me.

What was once the language of secrecy is now the language of power.

in the chaos of war, I would have looked simply small, and therefore neither a promise nor a threat.

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.

Uncertainty is more contagious than the plague. Cesare

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

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.