Why do long marriages occasionally endow their inhabitants with a rare kind of equilibrium otherwise almost unknown in human relations? My guess is that the value of the moment has at last overshadowed the long history of resentments, betrayals, and boredom.

Everyone likes to talk shop, which is the most interesting talk in the world, in the beginning.

Upon becoming fifty the one thing you can't afford is habit.

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

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]

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

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