“She could see that to lose a sibling was hard: it could only seem unnatural:out of time, out of order, a vicious re-run of your own departure into nothingness.”

“Do not despair, little Alice. Only persist, and thou shalt see, Jane Austen's all in all to thee.”

“Fortunately, there is more to life than death. There is for one thing, fiction. A thousand thousand characters to be sent marching out into the world to divert time from its forward gallop to the terrible horizon.”

“It seemed to me when I wrote The Life and Loves of a She-Devil that women were so much in the habit of being good it would do nobody any harm if they learned to be a little bad - that is to say, burn down their houses, give away their children, put their husband in prison, steal his money and turn themselves into their husband's mistress.”

“The insistence that somehow women are an endangered species that needs to be protected at all costs seems to me to be contrary to what's desirable for their view of themselves. And it just invests far more power in the male than is necessary.”

“As it has turned out, the whole relationship between men, women and children has tilted, to the disadvantage of women.”

“Absolutely,' she said. 'The more you pay attention to the body, the less attention you've got left to pay the soul. I really do understand that.”