She is, above all else, tired; she wants more than anything to return to her bed and her book. The world, this world, feels suddenly stunned and stunted, far from everything.

She is not a writer at all, really; she is merely a gifted eccentric.

I know, speaking for myself, no matter what I'm able to do, no matter what book comes out and ends up on paper, I always had something bigger and grander in my head.

Take me with you. I want a doomed love. I want streets at night, wind and rain, no one wondering where I am.

Remember, how often the great art of the past didn't look great at first, how often it didn't look like art at all; how much easier it is, decades or centuries later, to adore it, not only because it is, in fact, great but because it's still here; because the inevitable little errors and infelicities tend to recede in an object that's survived the War of 1812, the eruption of Krakatoa, the rise and fall of Nazism.

You want to give him the book of his own life, the book that will locate him, parent him, arm him for the changes.

She could have had a life as potent and dangerous as literature itself.