For years they have been using the role of 'sex object' as a cover while they spied out the land.

We are all tourists in history, and irony is what we win in wars.

A book is meant not only to be read, but to haunt you, to importune you like a lover or a parent, to be in your teeth like a piece of gristle.

Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.

The more I like a book, the more slowly I read. this spontaneous talking back to a book is one of the things that makes reading so valuable.

Two people making love, she once said, are like one drowned person resuscitating the other.

There was a time when we expected nothing of our children but obedience, as opposed to the present, when we expect everything of them but obedience.