There are ways in which art can have a longer reach than politics.

But it was too interesting, too new, too flattering, too deeply comforting to resist, it was a liberation to be in love and say so, and she could only let herself go deeper.

What reader wants to be told what attitude to strike?

...beauty, she had discovered occupied a narrow band. Ugliness, on the hand, had infinite variation.

Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion, and it is the beginning of morality.

I read in announcements of deaths 'peacefully in his sleep' and I wonder how many of those are true. Maybe they are just conventional. I hope they are true whenever I read it of someone. [But] I would rather be awake. Peacefully awake, brim full of some calming drug that was seeing me out of the door, having said my farewells.

The evasions of her little novel were exactly those of her life. Everything she did not wish to confront was also missing from her novella--and was necessary to it.