Do you understand the sadness of geography?

What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power. Nothing much of lasting value ever happens at the head table, held together by a familiar rhetoric. Those who already have power continue to glide along the familiar rut they have made for themselves.

The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.

From this point on, she whispered, we will either find or lose our souls.

Read him slowly, dear girl, you must read Kipling slowly. Watch carefully where the commas fall so you can discover the natural pauses. He is a writer who used pen and ink. He looked up from the page a lot, I believe, stared through his window and listened to birds, as most writers who are alone do. Some do not know the names of birds, though he did. Your eye is too quick and North American. Think about the speed of his pen. What an appalling, barnacled old first paragraph it is otherwise.

When you're writing, it's as if you're within a kind of closed world.

she had a laugh that hinted it had rolled around once or twice in the mud.