And one more thing. About my name - Artemis - you were right. In London, it is generally a female name, after the Greek goddess of archery. But every now and then a male comes along with such a talent...

The more I detest men individually the more ardent becomes my love for humanity.

I'd write of people and places like I knew, and I'd make my characters talk everyday English; and I'd let the sun rise and set in the usual quiet way without much fuss over the fact. If I had to have...

Such presumption, said Aunt Laura, meaning for a Dix to aspire to a Murray. It wasn't because of his presumption I packed him off, said Emily. It was because of the way he made love. He made a thing...

Behold yon miserable creature. That Point is a Being like ourselves, but confined to the non-dimensional Gulf. He is himself his own World, his own Universe; of any other than himself he can form no...

She doesn't believe in dogs, Bridget said. Dogs are hardly an article of faith, Sylvie said.

We have been married a little over a year and already there is a terrible silence around some subjects. We never speak of the disappearance of my brothers — a stranger listening to us would think it...

Oh, the accident necessary to fiction!

Love was supposed to be a kind of blissful insanity.

Passion is sweeter split strand by strand.

You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words:...

There was a star riding through clouds one night, & I said to the star, 'Consume me'.

Father O'Neil was putting hymnals in the backs of the pews when Puller and Knox walked in. Knox crossed herself as they walked up the aisle.

According to our Tang dynasty poet Du Fu, people do not write well when they are happy. If you are content with life, you simply want to enjoy it.

He was a man who knew there were such things as jokes in the world or people would not write about them, but had never actually been introduced to one or shaken its hand.

I read The Great Gatsby. It is one of my favorite books and I had taken it out of the library in hopes that it would cheer me up; of course, it only made me feel worse, since in my own humorless state...

Sometimes words need music too. Sometimes the descriptions are not enough. Books should be written with soundtracks, like films.

Narziss was dark and thin of face, and Goldmund open and radiant as a flower. Narziss was a thinker and anatomiser, Goldmund a dreamer and a child. Yet things common to both could bridge these...

Is there some vital connection between Norman church architecture and the milking of beef cattle of which I am unaware?

There's always tomorrow. Exactly, she said, finishing off her first doughnut, selecting a second. Maybe she wouldn't starve to death, she decided. Maybe she'd eat herself into obesity and explode....

Professor Dumbledore. Can I ask you something? Obviously, you've just done so, Dumbledore smiled. You may ask me one more thing, however. What do you see when you look in the mirror? I? I see myself...

There is nothing so unsatisfactory as an ending with loose ends, this modern tendency to leave books incomplete.

I owe everything I am and everything I will ever be to books.

Oedipa sat on the earth, ass getting cold, wondering whether, as Driblette had suggested that night from the shower, some version of herself hadn't vanished with him. Perhaps her mind would go on...

"... I hid myself between two leaves of sorrel, and there discharged the necessities of nature."

But you speak of Master Gandalf, as if he was in a story that had come to an end. 'Yes, we do,' said Pippin sadly. 'The story seems to be going on, but I am afraid Gandalf has fallen out of it.

He had a sort of dry musty smell, like a fairly clean Chinaman.

The plays he had liked were the one called Measure for Measure, and another one called Macbeth. They were easy to follow, and what happened in them was kind of like what happened in junior high...

I could easily forgive his pride, if he had not mortified mine.

Then she said good night and headed to her room.