They will be like shadows, they will be like wraiths, gray members of a congregation of nightmare; hark! his long wavering howl . . . an aria of fear made audible. The wolfsong is the sound of the rending you will suffer, in itself a murdering.

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

A fairy tale is the kind of story in which one king goes to another king to borrow a cup of sugar

He was a lovely man in many ways. But he kept on insisting on forgiving me when there was nothing to forgive.

If the Barbarians are destroyed, who will we then be able to blame for the bad things?

A mother is always a mother, since a mother is a biological fact, whilst a father is a movable feast.

F.R. Leavis's "eat up your broccoli" approach to fiction emphasises this junkfood/wholefood dichotomy. If reading a novel--for theeighteenth century reader, the most frivolous of diversions--did not, by the middle of the twentieth century, make you a better person in some way, then you might as well flush the offending volume down the toilet, which was by far the best place for the undigested excreta of dubious nourishment.