Repeat reading for me shares a few things with hot-water bottles and thumbsucking: comfort, familiarity, the recurrence of the expected.

Publishers are in business to make money, and if your books do well they don't care if you are male, female, or an elephant.

Modesty is invisibility... Never forget it. To be seen - to be seen - is to be... penetrated. What you must be girls, is impenetrable.

I'll make you mine, lovers said in old books. They never said, I'll make you me.

These things sneak up on him for no reason, these flashes of irrational happiness. It's probably a vitamin deficiency.

But I began then to think of time as having a shape, something you could see, like a series of liquid transparencies, one laid on top of another.

I've never understood why people consider youth a time of freedom and joy. It's probably because they have forgotten their own.