When men decided women could be educated - this is what I think - they educated them on the male plan; they put them into schools with mottoes and school songs and muddy team games, they made them wer...
Look at my face: I am not afraid of any man alive.
He saw that it was the gaps that were important, the spaces between the threads which made the pattern, and not the threads themselves.
We don’t have to invite pain in, he thinks. It’s waiting for us: sooner rather than later.
The maid found a handkerchief of hers, under the bed in which she had died. A ring that had been missing turned up in his own writing desk. A tradesman arrived with fabric she had ordered three weeks...
Talking to Robespierre, one tried to make the right noises; but what is right, these days? Address yourself to the militant, and you find a pacifist giving you a reproachful look. Address yourself to...
He makes a gesture, designed to impersonate frankness.
Another man would have trouble imagining it, but he has no trouble. The red of a carpet’s ground, the flush of the robin’s breast or the chaffinch, the red of a wax seal or the heart of the rose: impl...
You can be merry with the king, you can share a joke with him. But as Thomas More used to say, it's like sporting with a tamed lion. You tousle its mane and pull its ears, but all the time you're thin...
There is a pause, while she turns the great pages of her volume of rage, and puts her finger on just the right word.
The story of my own childhood is a complicated sentence that I am always trying to finish, to finish and put behind me. It resists finishing, and partly this is because words are not enough; my early...
Render me the texture of flesh. Pick me what it is, in the timbre of the voice, that marks out the living from the dead.
In Paris the swaying lanterns are lit in the streets; lights shine through water, fuzzy, diffuse. Saint-Just sits by an insufficient fire, in a poor light. He is a Spartan after all, and Spartans don’...
He says in his defence he never meddled with married women, only with virgins.
He is tired out from the effort of deciphering the world. Tired from the effort of smiling at the foe.
He finds he cannot think of the dying men at all. Into his mind instead strays the picture of More on the scaffold, seen through the veil of rain: his body, already dead, folding back neatly from the...
Fiction leaves us so much work to do, allows the individual so much input; you have to see, you have to hear, you have to taste the madeleine, and while you are seemingly passive in your chair, you ha...
When I was small I dreamed of demons. I thought they were under my bed, but you said, it can't be so, you don't get demons our side of the river, the guards won't let them over London Bridge.
There's nothing in this breathing world so gratifying as an artfully placed semicolon.
In order not to make a liar out of Henry or Katherine, one or the other, the committee men think up circumstances in which the match may have been partly consummated, or somewhat consummated, and to d...