“Herman Melville is not comforting. Emily Dickinson isn’t either. Maybe their work is too hungry for comfort, or just too vivid for comfort. But Henry James is – profoundly so. Because he is tender. The tenderness is there in the structure of the sentence. He knows the way the poor and the dead are forgotten by the living, and he cannot allow that to happen. So he keeps on writing for them, for the dead, as if they were children to be sheltered and loved, never abandoned.”

“Now faith is not what wehereafter have we have aworld resting on nothingRest was never more thanabstract since it is emptyreality we cannot escape”

“We are all clothed with fleece of sheep I keep saying as ifI were singing as these words do. Throw a shawl over meso you won't be afraid to sleep. I have already shown thatspace is God.”

“There's no rage like old lady rage, just as there's no tenderness like old lady tenderness.”

“The dead must humor the mourners, he thought, and the sick must comfort the visitors. It was always so.”

“So I was for stories. I was for stries just as gannets were for balls of silver-flashing fish - I'd crash towards them, gaping. I'd try for as many as I could. And I'd keep them safe like feathers in a vase... They have been my comfort. My family. My strange nourishment.”

“we that were wood when that wide wood was in a physical Universe playing with words bark be my limbs my hair be leaf Bride be my bow my lyre my quiver ”