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

“I remember wishing the moment would hold forever; that we could be fixed there, laughing and irredescent... Then I got panicky because I knew it would pass; that it was passing already.”

“Modernity consists in a revolt against the prevailing style, an unyielding rage against the official order.”

“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.”

“I felt like that character in Flowers for Algernon. Not Charlie, the lady teacher from the college who realizes, 'I've got to stop dry-humping this mentally challenged guy!”

“There's no such thing as a wasted wish.”

“There's only one thing I need." I placed my hand on his heart. "The rest is just details.”