“(A) trip to the attic is an excursion into history, and...all over the world the present unravels beneath the stored detritus of the past; that's what attics are for.”

“I wasn't just the madwoman in the attic--I was the attic itself. The past was all over me, all under me, all inside me.”

“The past is an old armchair in the attic, the present an ominous ticking sound, and the future is anybody’s guess. ”

“In the modern view, the pitched roof was itself a “dead concept,” but equally unhealthywere all those other dead concepts that got stored underneath the gable, in the attic. For there is where the ghosts of our past reside: the bric-abracand mementos that a lifetime collects; the love letters, photographs, and memories that clutter an attic and threaten to bear us back in time.”

“Secretly, in studies and attics and schoolrooms all over America, people must be writing.”

“So many old and lovely things are stored in the world's attic because we don't want them around us and we don't dare throw them out.”