I was the basest of readers. All I wanted was my own world, and myself in it, given back to me in artful shapes and accessible form.

She had lolled about for three years at Girton with the kind of books she could equally have read at home--Jane Austen, Dickens, Conrad, all in the library downstairs, in complete sets. How had that pursuit, reading the novels that others took as their leisure, let her think she was superior to anyone else?

Writers are said to have superstitions and little rituals. Readers have them too.

When people have supernatural beliefs I think they should be respected but there is no reason why they need to impose them on others.

Novels help us to resist the temptation to think of the past as deficient.

When they kissed she immediately felt his tongue, tensed and strong, pushing past her teeth, like some bully shouldering his way into a room. Entering her.

She returned his gaze, struck by the sense of her own transformation, and overwhelmed by the beauty which a lifetime havit had taught her to ignore.