“You send a girl to school in order to make friends - the right sort.”

“For now that Aphra Behn had done it, girls could go to their parents and say, You need not give me an allowance; I can make money by my pen.”

“Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money.”

“She had a right to his arm, though it was without feeling. He would give her, who was so simple, so impulsive, only twenty-four, without friends in England, who had left Italy for his sake, a piece of bone.”

“the sort of fish that a good fisherman puts back into the water”

“For nothing matters except life; and, of course, order.”

“Why, I ask, can I not finish the letter that I am writing? For my room is always scattered with unfinished letters. I begin to suspect, when I am with you, that I am among the most gifted of men. I am filled with the delight of youth, with potency, with the sense of what is to come. blundering, but fervid, I see myself buzzing round flowers, humming down scarlet cups, making blue funnels resound with my prodigious booming. How richly I shall enjoy my youth (you make me feel). And London. And freedom. But stop. You are not listening. You are making some protest, as you slide, with an inexpressibly familiar gesture, your hand along your knee. By such signs we diagnose our friends' diseases. "Do not, in your affluence and plenty," you seem to say, "pass me by." "Stop," you say. "Ask me what I suffer.”