You have hardened your heart against your American cousin. It was courageous in the memoir to state so clearly how you had to harden your heart against so much, to survive. Americans believe that suff...
You could be thoroughly an intellectual while not surrendering maleness; you could not be so totally intellectual and not surrender some degree of femaleness.
Yet within seconds she summoned her steely will, this will that so impressed Dirk Burnaby, for he’d never encountered anything like it in his life, establishing where she was, and why. The bad dream w...
Yet The Falls exerted its malevolent spell, that never weakened. If you grew up in the Niagara region, you knew. Adolescence was the dangerous time. Most Niagara natives kept their distance from The F...
Whoever's reading this, if anyone is reading it: does it matter that our old selves are lost to us as surely as the past is lost, or is it enough to know yes we lived then, and we are living now, and...
Which is why we say meaning
What've I got to do, to prove how much I love you? Blow us all away?
Well, no. Marianne thought there could be lots worse.
We see the shadows of things, not the things themselves . . . We are forced to imagine what the writer doesn’t reveal.
We are beasts and this is our consolation.
Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live’—the Americans understand this admonition, deep in their killer-souls.
This determination to manage—to cope—to do as much unassisted as possible—is the Widow’s prerogative. You might argue that it’s a sign of her wish to appear to be—which is not the same as being—self-s...
There are people, primarily women!--who are what I call 'conduits of emotion.' In their company, the half dead can come alive. They need not be beautiful women or girls. It's a matter of blood warmth....
The writer understands how deeply mysterious the 'familiar' really is. How strangely opaque, what we've seen a thousand times. And how inconsolable a loss, when the taken-for-granted is finally taken...
The person you love best, you share the world with. When that person's gone the world remains but it isn't the same thing, it's at a distance.
The novel is the affliction for which only the novel is the cure.
She will speculate that she didn’t fully know her husband—this will give her leverage to seek him, to come to know him. It will keep her husband alive in her memory—elusive, teasing.
She was standing with her thin arms lifted in a pose of crucifixion as the white satin gown with its myriad pearl buttons, tucks and pleats and ingenious lace trim, was fitted onto her like an exquisi...
She had paid for these mistakes. (Had she?) But still, you are never fully acquitted of any mistake that involves another, and so the Intern had not been fully acquitted of her mistakes, and her shame...
Only in love is there trust - even the possibility of trust.