Why is it he feels some line has been crossed, some boundary transgressed? How much is too much, how far is too far?

Women are human beings, and human beings are a very mixed lot. I've always been against the idea that women were Victorian angels, that they could do no wrong. I've always thought it was horseshit and does nobody any good. Remember, Lizzie Borden got off largely because the cultural agenda had convinced people that women were morally superior to men, so Lizzie Borden was "incapable" of taking the ax and giving her mother 40 whacks.

The desire to be loved is the last illusion. Give it up and you will be free.

She knows herself to be at the mercy of events, and she knows by now that events have no mercy.

Ordinary, said Aunt Lydia, is what you are used to. This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary.

Reading is one of the most individual things that happens. So every reader is going to read a piece in a slightly different way, sometimes a radically different way.

If the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania, that of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia.