I was, after all, the daughter of a man who believed that to be involved with books was to live at the heart of light, and the former wife of a man who shared his faith.

Mystery fiction is, after all, a substitute for tranquilizers, strong drink, and bad, if diverting, companions. One slips into bed ... onto the train ... into the chair in the sickroom ... and is suddenly transported to a place where light fights dark and wins. When the story's over, one is left without a hangover, without remorse. Can any other opiate make that claim?

I had wanted to come back to Greenwich Village ever since I had left Waverly Place, and since moving to West Eleventh Street, I have never lived anyplace else. I do not want to. That is not because of what the Village is but because of what I have made it, and what I have made it depends on who I am at the time.

I was, after all, the daughter of a man who believed that to be involved with books was to live at the heart of light, and the former wife of a man who shared his faith.

the hymns were born in the fifteenth or sixteenth century or earlier, and listening to them was like licking an icicle: the same chill, the same purity.

Gardeners, I think, dream bigger dreams than Emperor's.

In giving our daughter life, her father and I had also given her death, something I hadn't realized until that new creature flailed her arms in what was now infinite space. We had given her disease and speeding cars and flying cornices: once out of the fortress that had been myself, she would never be safe again ... We disappoint our kids and they disappoint us, and sometimes they grow up into people we don't like very much. We go on loving, though what we love may be more memory than actuality. And until the day we die we fear the phone that rings in the middle of the night.