The days weren't long enough for the reading she wanted to do.

Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.

Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.

The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature. Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal, herself included. Literature, she thought, is a commonwealth; letters a republic.

...she felt about reading what some writers felt about writing: that it was impossible not to do it and that at this late stage of her life she had been chosen to read as others were chosen to write.

Of course my standards are out of date! That's why they're called standards.

Art comes out of art; it begins with imitation, often in the form of parody, and it's in the process of imitating the voice of others that one comes to learn the sound of one's own.