“Most grown-ups are never happier than when they have someone to look down on, and the Cooper Island Farsiders couldn't have been more delighted that they had the Cooper Lowsiders to despise. As long as the Farsiders had their immediate neighbors to oppress, they were saved the exacting inconvenience of recognizing their own shortcomings.”

“I had cooperated. I could not have refused. I was smitten with her, half in love but also afraid, because in my life (and she seemed to know this) I had not loved anyone without having been wounded. Love was power and possession, love caused pain: you were never more exposed than when you were in love, never more wounded; possession was an enslavement, something stifling.”

“Leatherbound books are an expensive form of wallpaper, and yet every English nobleman’s home seems to have had them. Their endless sets of the works of Cooper and Scott and Goethe, in finely tanned bindings with marbled endpapers, all end up with this sort of dealer sooner or later. I look through a set of Cooper and, without surprise, find uncut pages: these books were never actually read.”

“If I had grown up in that house I couldn't have loved it more, couldn't have been more familiar with the creak of the swing, or the pattern of the clematis vines on the trellis, or the velvety swell of land as it faded to gray on the horizon . . . . The very colors of the place had seeped into my blood.”

“Everyone is happier if they have someone else to look down on, as well as someone to look up to, especially if they resent both.”

“Someone had to go first, show that there was a life to be recorded here, that this place, this new set of possibilities, could inspire a new literature. Cooper set the signpost on the road, and hearty travelers have been following it ever since.”