A literary academic can no more pass a bookstore than an alcoholic can pass a bar.

Normal is absolutely my least favorite word.

Quoting, like smoking, is a dirty habit to which I am devoted.

Professors of literature collect books the way a ship collects barnacles, without seeming effort.

Whether deliberately, unconsciously or accidentally, she seems to have composed her own life so that its fitful, rudderless, and self-doubting first half was alchemized into gold when the austere bluestocking became the fallen woman.

Male friends do not always face each other; they stand side by side, facing the world.

Women, I believe, search for fellow beings who have faced similar struggles, conveyed them in ways a reader can transform into her own life, confirmed desires the reader had hardly acknowledge-desires that now seem possible. Women catch courage from the women whose lives and writings they read, and women call the bearer of that courage friend. [p. 138]