“What kind of country is this where a woman can't weep her heart out on the highways and byways without being tormented by retired bill-brokers!”

“Into my heart an air that killsFrom yon far country blows:What are those blue remembered hills,What spires, what farms are those?That is the land of lost content,I see it shining plain,The happy highways where I wentAnd cannot come again.”

“You're right. I'm not the kind of woman to do something foolish out of defiance. I am, however, the kind of woman who would do something just to prove that you can't tell me what kind of woman I am.”

“The only way to a woman's heart is along the path of torment.”

“When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to. Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”

“Bill could smell Its breath and it was a smell like exploded animals lying on the highway at midnight.”