“The woman was putting her purse in the drawer and settling down behind the desk, and I realized I had never seen her before in my life. Her face was as wrinkled as one of those forgotten apples you sometimes find in the pocket of last year's winter jacket.Yes?" she said, peering over her spectacles. They teach them to do that at the Royal Academy of Library Science.”

“The Witch's Life"When I was a childthere was an old woman in our neighborhood whom we called The Witch.All day she peered from her second storywindowfrom behind the wrinkled curtainsand sometimes she would open the windowand yell: Get out of my life!She had hair like kelpand a voice like a boulder.I think of her sometimes nowand wonder if I am becoming her.”

“An old woman with a mutch sat in an arm-chair behind the counter. She looked up at me over her spectacles and smiled, and I took to her on the instant. She had the kind of old wise face that God loves.”

“What she saw in their eyes terrified her. She was a woman traveling alone, in a country that had not seen exposed female faces in over five years. She turned back and cried tears of frustration all the way to Pakistan. ...Asra..., I find her fantasy delightful. Who else would risk her life to take stuffies to Afghanistan?”

“Sometimes, as Eve was born from one of Adam’s ribs, a woman was born during my sleep from a cramped position of my thigh. Formed from the pleasure I was on the point of enjoying, she, I imagined, was the one offering it to me. My body, which felt in hers my own warmth, would try to find itself inside her, I would wake up. The rest of humanity seemed very remote compared to this woman I had left scarcely a few moments before; my cheek was still warm from her kiss, my body aching from the weight of hers. If, as sometimes happens, she had the features of a woman I had known in life, I would devote myself entirely to this end: to finding her again, like those who go off on a journey to see a longed-for city with their own eyes and imagine that one can enjoy in reality the charm of a dream. Little by little, the memory of her would fade, I had forgotten the girl of my dream.”

“No, she’d spent the last five years begging the Lord to help her find contentment in her spinster status. And he’d been faithful. She had her library, her Ladies Aid work, the children’s reading hour. She could come and go as she pleased, spend her money as she deemed fit, all without the hassle of first gaining a man’s permission. And if the loneliness sometimes ate away at her like water poured on a sugarloaf . . . ? Well, God had seen her through the last five years. She figured he could be depended upon to see her through the next fifty.”