What can it be about low temperatures that sharpens the edges of objects?

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?

No one knows anything, really. It's all rented, or borrowed.

Be wary of too much calm, particularly in your mid-fifties.

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.

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

At that moment, the urge to be writing was stronger than any notion she had of what she might write.