Do gooders don't interest me. They are the least interesting people on the planet.

Bink, said Gollie, I must inform you that you are giving a home to a truly unremarkable fish. I love him, said Bink.

In point of fact, she had never looked as well. She had entered her room as just an impossibly lovely girl. The woman who emerged was a trifle thinner, a great deal wiser, an ocean sadder. This one...

What's your name?" Emma Gould, she said. "What's yours?" Wanted. "By all the girls or just the law?

She smiled darkly and shook her head. "I'm not crazy. I'm not. Of course what else would a crazy person claim? That's the Kafkaesque genius of it all. If you're not crazy but people have told the...

But the plains do not continue forever, just as happiness and sorrow both eventually come to an end. Their first hint of the highlands was a rough stretch of land pitted with gorges and rugged valleys...

here George Eliot had progressed through the bookshelves. Roland saw her black silk skirts, her velvet trains, sweeping compressed between the Fathers of the Church, and heard her firm foot ring on...

"And Charlotte!" said Mrs. Shields in tones of disgust. "Who even knew there was a town called Charlotte?"

There had never been such roses as those that bloomed that summer. They clambered everywhere and dripped as if perspiring the heaviest most intoxicating perfume, which seemed to make the very masonry...

They yearn for what they fear for.

For six months, then, Emma, at fifteen years of age, made her hands dirty with books from old lending libraries.

The book was in her lap; she had read no further. The power to change one's life comes from a paragraph, a lone remark. The lines that penetrate us are slender, like the flukes that live in river...

Barbara Shanahan, sometimes known as Battering Ram Shanahan. She was over six feet tall and had freckles and wore her light red hair cut short and wore a blue suit with white hose. She worked hard and...

Ashley watched her go and saw her square her small shoulders as she went. And that gesture went to his heart, more than any words she had spoken.

A misunderstanding? With an anvil? Oh, stop, I think he looks very dashing. As if he dashed into an anvil.

Vaughn nodded. Lije steadied himself and looked into the woods. Never could abide no roof. Ours ain't the best, Vaughn said. Leaks come spring. Lije pointed at Venus faint above the distant ridge. The...

Abandon all patience, ye who enter beyond this door.

See Monsieur Geborand, buying a pennyworth of paradise.

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 Brothers Karamazov is a joyful book.

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

LEWIS CARROLL'S CIPHER

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...

It wouldn't do to have all our dreams fulfilled. We would be as good as dead if we had nothing left to dream about.

After all, it is fairy tales the world wants. Real life is all the 'real life' we want. Give us something better in books.

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...

Tell me... is there really no other way for you but this? To kneel down forever before an army of boys for just five dirty minutes in the dark? Think... of the men who have kneled before you while you...

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...

The last I saw of him was of a dark blue back marching towards Shaftesbury Avenue; eternally the victor in a war where the losers win.

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