For the professors in the academy, for the humanities generally, misery is more amenable to analysis: happiness is a harder nut to crack.

We know so little about each other. We lie mostly submerged, like ice floes, with our visible social selves projecting only cool and white.

Narrative tension is primarily about withholding information.

The primitive thinking of the supernaturally inclined amounts to what his psychiatric colleagues call a problem, or an idea, of reference. An excess of the subjective, the ordering of the world in line with your needs, an inability to contemplate your own unimportance. In Henry's view such reasoning belongs on a spectrum at whose far end, rearing like an abandoned temple, lies psychosis.

Novels without female characters were a lifeless desert.

It was thought, perception, sensations that interested her, the conscious mind as a river through time, and how to represent its onward roll, as well as all the tributaries that would swell it, and the obstacles that would divert it. If only she could reproduce the clear light of a summer's morning.

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