“I love revision. Where else can spilled milk be turned into ice cream?”

“I love revisions…We can’t go back and revise our lives, but being allowed to go back and revise what we have written comes closest.”

“All of us can think of a book... that we hope none of our children or any other children have taken off the shelf. But if I have the right to remove that book from the shelf - that work I abhor - then you also have exactly the same right and so does everyone else. And then we have no books left on the shelf for any of us.”

“Thus, in a real sense, I am constantly writing autobiography,but I have to turn it into fiction in order to give it credibility.”

“I have been mocked by beauty, too. But it was the beauty which cost me nothing that in the end turned upon me.”

“It’s the principle of the thing, Jess . That’s what you’ve got to understand. You have to stop people like that. Otherwise they turn into tyrants and dictators.”

“...the long train ride was like traveling through limbo. You weren't anywhere when you were on a train, she decided. You weren't where you had been, and you weren't yet where you were going. You were nowhere. It might be beautiful outside the window-and it was, she had sense enough to realize that-but it wasn't anywhere to her, just a scene passing by that was framed by the train window. (p160)”