“I had evoked - and the book was indeed all I had suspected.”

“I suspected that there were things he knew that I had been waiting all my life to learn.”

“When I was a child, Mama had the best voice of all the members of the church. She had loved to sing. Her words had soared like an angel's over the swells of the organ. In fact, I now suspected, her entire theology had been taken from the hymnal.”

“The apartment was entirely, was only, for her; a wall of books, both read and unread, all of them dear to her not only in themselves, their tender spines, but in the moments or periods they evoked. She had kept some books...which suggested to her that she was, or might be, a person of seriousness, a thinker in some seeping, ubiquitous way; and she had kept, too, a handful of children's books...that conjured for her an earlier, passionately earnest self.”

“I continued up the stairs, this time on wings, suspecting for the first time that Louisa's book might outlive us all. ”

“By the time I was sixteen I had read many books and I had become a freethinker.”