I wanted to wear the mantle and the pearls. I wanted to know the man who painted her like that.

We say very little, for we do not need to. We are silent together, each in her own world, knowing the other is just at her back.

You're so calm and quiet, you never say. But there are things inside you. I see them sometimes, hiding in your eyes.

Normally book ideas come to me in a moment.

Jane Austen easily used half a page describing someone else's eyes; she would not appreciate summarizing her reading tastes in ten titles.

You know I don’t listen to market gossip,” she began, “but it is hard not to hear it when my daughter’s name is mentioned.

He saw things in a way that others did not, so that a city I had lived in all my life seemed a different place, so that a woman became beautiful with the light on her face.