With a novelist, like a surgeon, you have to get a feeling that you've fallen into good hands - someone from whom you can accept the anesthetic with confidence.

And I'm convinced that knowing the names of things braces people up.

The ocean was waiting with grand and bitter provocations, as if it invited you to think how deep it was, how much colder than your blood or saltier, or to outguess it, to tell which were its feints or passes and which its real intentions, meaning business.

The body, she says, is subject to the force of gravity. But the soul is ruled by levity, pure.

One must bear in mind the odd angle or slant that the rays of love have to take in order to reach a heart like mine.

It wasn't that he was specially ungenerous but that he put things off to give his generosity a longer and more significant route.

...there is no old age of the soul.