She said to the Daisy girl with her big brown eyes: 'I will not have it plain. No. Fancy. It must be fancy!' She meant her future. A moon-daisy dropped to the floor, down from her hair, like a faintly derisive sign from heaven.

There was a house we all had in common and it was called the past, even though we'd lived in different rooms.

Proposition one: time is a man, space is a woman.

What would the daughters of the rich do with themselves if the poor ceased to exist?

The end of all stories, even if the writer forebears to mention it, is death, which is where time stops short. Sheherezade knew this, which is why she kept on spinning another story out of the bowels of the last one, never coming to a point where she could say: "This is the end." Because it would have been.

A book is simply the container of an idea-like a bottle; what is inside the book is what matters.

It's every woman's tragedy, that, after a certain age, she looks like a female impersonator. Mind you, we've known some lovely female impersonators, in our time.