Nevertheless the severance is rather casual and it drops a stain on our admiration of Nora. Ibsen has put the leaving of her children on the same moral and emotional level as the leaving of...

Now, my novel begins. No, now I begin my novel—and yet I cannot decide whether to call myself I or she.

There is nothing quite like this novel with its rage and ragings, its discontent and angry restlessness. Wuthering Heights is a virgin’s story.

The large, gaping flaws in the construction of the stories–mad wives in the attic, strange apparitions in Belgium–are a representation of the life she could not face; these gothic subterfuges represent the mind at a...

The ‘swapping’ is interesting. This practice one had thought confined to certain earnest Americans in the smaller, more tedious cities, to those wives and husbands who had read sex manuals and radically wanted more of...

[Charlotte Bronte] had thought of every maneuver for circumventing those stony obstructions of wives who would not remove themselves.

In this couple defects were multiplied, as if by a dangerous doubling; weakness fed upon itself without a counterstrength and they were trapped, defaults, mutually committed, left holes everywhere in their lives. When you read...

the great is seldom a deterrent to the mediocre

The greatest gift is the passion for reading.It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites,it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind.It is a moral illumination.

Reading is a discount ticket to everywhere.

In those years I did not care to enjoy sex, only to have it. That is what seeing Alex again on Fifth Avenue brought back to me – a youth of fascinated, passionless copulation. There...

They had created themselves together, and they always saw themselves, their youth, their love, their lost youth and lost love, their failures and memories, as a sort of living fiction.

Alas, the heart is not a metaphor, or at least not always a metaphor.