Why do we think love is a magician? Because the whole power of magic consists in love. The work of magic is the attraction of one thing by another because of a certain affinity of nature.
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Marsilio Ficino
In 1494, King Charles VIII of France invaded Italy. Within months, his army collapsed and fled. It was routed not by the Italian army but by a microbe. A mysterious new disease spread through sex killed many of Charles’s soldiers and left survivors weak and...
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Carl Zimmer
The days go by, through the brief silence of winter, when the sunshine is so still and pure, like iced wine, and the dead leaves gleam brown, and water sounds hoarse in the ravines.
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D.h. Lawrence
It’s almost as if all the sleazy men in this country attended the same seminar, where they learned that all American women go to Italy to sleep with them. The teacher at the seminar told them, “You don’t need to learn English to seduce an...
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Rita Stradling
As the sun rose I could see Etna, a truncated cone with a plume of smoke over it like the quill of a pen stuck in a pewter inkpot, rising out of the haze to the north of where I was treading water.
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Eric Newby
