“She used a line from Trollope's Barchester Towers as an epigraph:"There is no happiness in love, except at the end of an English novel.”

“She'd become an English major for the purest and dullest of reasons: because she loved to read.”

“When it comes to love, there are a million theories to explain it. But when it comes to love stories, things are simpler. A love story can never be about full posession. The happy marriage, the requited love, the desire that never dims-- these are lucky eventualities but they aren't love stories. Love stories depend on disappointment, on unequal births and feuding families, on matrimonial boredom and at least one cold heart. Love stories, nearly without exception, give love a bad name.”

“...the novel had reached its apogee with the marriage plot and had never recovered from its disappearance. In the days when success in life had depended on marriage, and marriage had depended on money, novelists had had a subject to write about. The great epics sang of war, the novel of marriage. Sexual equality, good for women, had been bad for the novel. And divorce had undone it completely. What would it matter whom Emma married if she could file for separation later? How would Isabel Archer’s marriage to Gilbert Osmond have been affected by the existence of a prenup? As far as Saunders was concerned, marriage didn’t mean much anymore, and neither did the novel. Where could you find the marriage plot nowadays? You couldn’t. You had to read historical fiction. You had to read non-Western novels involving traditional societies. Afghani novels, Indian novels. You had to go, literarily speaking, back in time.”

“You used to be able to tell a person's nationality by the face. Immigration ended that. Next you discerned nationality via the footwear. Globalization ended that.”

“She was a large, disordered woman, like a child's drawing that didn't stay within the lines.”

“And yet sometimes she worried about those musty old books were doing to her. Some people majored in English to prepare for law school. Others became journalists.”