“Creative Writing was not a form of psychotherapy, in ways both sublime and ridiculuous, it clearly was, precisely that.”

“Lists are a form of power.”

“Only write to me, write to me, I love to see the hop and skip and sudden starts of your ink.”

“Good writing is always new.”

“She had had the idea that the mineral world was a world of perfect, inanimate forms, with an unchanging mathematical order of crystals and molecules beneath its sprouts and flows and branches. She had thought, when she started thinking, about her own transfiguration as something profoundly unnatural, a move from a world of warm change and decay to a world of cold permanence.But as she became mineral, and looked into the idea of minerals, she saw that there were reciprocities, both physical and figurative.”

“The class, on the other hand, buzzed and hummed with the anticipated pleasure of writing it up, one day. They were vindicated. Miss Fox belonged after all in the normal world of their writings, the world of domestic violence, torture and shock-horror. They would write what they knew, what had happened to Cicely Fox, and it would be most satisfactorily therapeutic.”

“I worry about anthropomorphism as a form of self-deception. (The Christian religion is an anthropomorphic account of the universe.)”