“Still, to be urged to write and to be urged to publish are two different things and nobody so far was urging her to do the latter.”

“One has met and indeed entertained many visiting heads of state, some of them unspeakable crooks and blackguards....One has given one's white-gloved hand to hands that were steeped in blood and conversed politely with men who have personally slaughtered children. One has waded through excrement and gore....Sometimes one has felt like a scented candle, sent in to perfume a regime, or aerate a policy, monarchy these days just a government-issue deoderant.”

“...But what is it all about, what am I trying to do, is there a message? Nobody knows, and I certainly don't. If one could answer these questions in any other way than by writing what one has written, then there would be no point in writing at all.”

“...she felt about reading what some writers felt about writing: that it was impossible not to do it and that at this late stage of her life she had been chosen to read as others were chosen to write.”

“Still, for all that everybody, while not happy, is not unhappy about it. And so they go on.”

“At eighty things do not occur; they recur.”

“To begin with, it's true, she read with trepidation and some unease. The sheer endlessness of books outfaced her and she had no idea how to go on; there was no system to her reading, with one book leading to another, and often she had two or three on the go at the same time.”