These days, Clarissa believes, you measure people first by their kindness and their capacity for devotion. You get tired, sometimes, of wit and intellect; everybody's little display of genius.

One always has a better book in one's mind than one can manage to get onto paper.

Dead, we are revealed in our true dimensions, and they are surprisingly modest.

That summer when she was eighteen, it seemed anything could happen, anything at all.

Like my hero Virginia Woolf, I do lack confidence. I always find that the novel I'm finishing, even if it's turned out fairly well, is not the novel I had in my mind. I think a lot of writers must negotiate this, and if they don't admit it, they're not being honest.

She thinks how much more space a being occupies in life than it does in death; how much illusion of size is contained in gestures and movements, in breathing. Dead, we are revealed in our true dimensions, and they are surprisingly modest.

She is overtaken by a sensation of unbeing. There is no other word for it.