We live, we die, we are remembered, we are forgotten.

Alice Munro can move characters through time in a way that no other writer can.

Well, they each seem to do one thing well enough, but fail to realize that literature depends on doing several things well at the same time.

What is the easiest, the most comfortable thing for a writer to do? To congratulate the society in which he lives: to admire its biceps, applaud its progress, tease it endearingly about its follies.

And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability.

[Flaubert] didn’t just hate the railway as such; he hated the way it flattered people with the illusion of progress. What was the point of scientific advance without moral advance? The railway would merely permit more people to move about, meet and be stupid together.

Life isn't just addition and subtraction. There's also the accumulation, the multiplication, of loss, of failure.