“Novels, since the birth of the genre, have been full of rejected, seduced, and abandoned maidens, whose proper fate is to die...”

“Because if one has an image, however dim and romantic, of a journey's end, one may, in the end, surely reach it, after no matter how many detours and deceptions and abandonings of hope. And hope could never have been entirely abandoned, even in the worst days.”

“Auntie Phyl's last months in the care home were extra pieces. Age is unnecessary. Some of us, like my mother, are fortunate enough to die swiftly and suddenly, in full possession of our faculties and our fate, but more and more of us will be condemned to linger, at the mercy of anxious or indifferent relatives, careless strangers, unwanted medical interventions, increasing debility, incontinence, memory loss. We live too long, but, like the sibyl hanging in her basket in the cave at Cumae, we find it hard to die.”

“There would be more genuine rejoicing at the discovery of a complete new novel by Jane Austen than any other literary discovery, short of a new major play by Shakespeare.”

“I'd rather be at the end of a dying tradition, which I admire, than at the beginning of a tradition which I deplore.”

“Too much of the world was inhospitable, intractable... Why prove that it had ever once been green?”

“I need words and print... I need print like an addict. I could live without it, perhaps. But I hope I never have to try.”