“...she herself loved the character of Elizabeth Bennet. "I must confess that I think her as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print, and how I shall be able to tolerate those who do not like her at least, I do not know.”

“This last year she has been in danger of becoming an eccentric or else one of those persons who does not bother to put a saucer under her cup.”

“I won't even mention the swift, transitory reward of lemon spray wax. Danielle Westerman and I have discussed the matter of housework. Not surprisingly, she, always looking a little dérisoire, believes that women have been enslaved by their possessions. Acquiring and then tending--these eat up a woman's creativity, anyone's creativity. But I've been watching the ways she arranges articles on a shelf, and how carefully she sets a table, even with it is just me coming into Toronto to have lunch in her sunroom.”

“It's the arrangement of events which makes the stories. It's throwing away, compressing, underlining. Hindsight can give structure to anything, but you have to be able to see it. Breathing, waking and sleeping: our lives are steamed and shaped into stories. Knowing that is what keeps me from going insane, and though I don't like to admit it, sometimes it's the only thing.”

“nothing she didor saidwas quitewhat she meantbut still her lifecould be called a monumentshaped in a slantof available lightand set to the movementof possible music”

“This is why I read novels: so I can escape my own unrelenting monologue.”

“In one day I had altered my life; my life, therefore, was alterable. This simple axiom did not call out for exegesis; no, it entered my bloodstream directly, as powerful as heroin. I could feel it pump and surge, the way it brightened my veins to a kind of glass. I had wakened that morning to narrowness and predestination and now I was falling asleep in the storm of my own free will.”