The French poet Mallarmé claimed that “everything in the world exists to end up in a book,” and if that’s true, and that even every boy is a book, Federico was undoubtedly created by the pen of Keats or some other tormented Romantic poet; while Matteo was pure passion, like Shakespeare’s Romeo: spontaneous, intense, and impetuously real.

Marika could feel herself cocking the trigger of a loaded gun and pointing it at herself, because the truth could be too shocking a revelation, something that would shake their lives to the core... but lies were just a dead-end alleyway that offered no way out.

She had feared the worst, and even though at that very moment she would have liked to wring her neck, she was happy to learn that suicide was not one of the stupid things that Eve had in her repertoire. Suicide made no sense: situations change, people change, and the problems of today may find a solution tomorrow. So long as you’re in the game you can change the final score, but if you take yourself out of it, you’ll never know how it might have ended, and you let the world win.

She’s my best friend, and I’m hers. Nothing needs to change between us.” He was afraid, not because he thought she wasn’t the one. He was terrified, because he knew she was.

Your soul can’t inhabit another person’s body.

I don’t know anything about other clubs and the national team, and I don’t care about them either.... I love the guy, not the soccer player.

I’d do anything for her if she really wanted me to. I would even walk away from the chance of a lifetime if she asked me to... and I could even be happy about it.

There are people in my life who count more than playing soccer in Serie A.

I love everything about you. And I’ve felt that way for such a long time that it could last forever.