Novels without female characters were a lifeless desert.

Reading groups, readings, breakdowns of book sales all tell the same story: when women stop reading, the novel will be dead.

All she had needed was the certainty of his love, and his reassurance that there was no hurry when a lifetime lay ahead of them.

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.

I'm holding back, delaying the information. I'm lingering in the prior moment because it was a time when other outcomes were still possible.

I watched our friends' wary, intelligent faces droop at our tale. Their shock was a mere shadow of our own, resembling more the goodwilled imitation of that emotion, and for this reason it was a temptation to exaggerate, to throw a rope of superlatives across the abyss that divided experience from its representation by anecdote.

It marked the beginning and, of course, an end. At that moment a chapter, no, a whole stage of my closed. Had I known, and had there been a spare second or two, I might have allowed myself a little nostalgia.