Life without illusion is a ghostly affair.

Why are women... so much more interesting to men than men are to women?

Moreover, a book is not made of sentences laid end to end, but of sentences built, if an image helps, into arcades or domes.

Arrange whatever pieces come your way.

They came to her, naturally, since she was a woman, all day long with this and that; one wanting this, another that; the children were growing up; she often felt she was nothing but a sponge sopped full of human emotions.

Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible.

The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it.