Indeed, learning to write may be part of learning to read. For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading.

My mother read secondarily for information; she sank as a hedonist into novels. She read Dickens in the spirit in which she would have eloped with him.

She read Dickens in the spirit in which she would have eloped with him.

Suppose you meet me in the woods.

Fiction shows us the past as well as the present moment in mortal light; it is an art served by the indelibility of our memory, and one empowered by a sharp and prophetic awareness of what is ephemeral. It is by the ephemeral that our feeling is so strongly aroused for what endures.

The novelist works neither to correct nor to condone, not at all to comfort, but to make what's told alive.

Travel itself is part of some longer continuity.