The Summer Without Men

We all smell of mortality, and we can’t wash it off. There is nothing we can do about it except perhaps burst into song.

Some of us are fated to live in a box from which there is only temporary release. We of the damned-up spirits, of the thwarted feelings, of the blocked hearts, and the pent-up thoughts, we who long to blast out, flood forth in a torrent of rage or joy or even madness, but there is nowhere for us to go

After all, we, none of us, can ever untangle the knot of fictions that make up that wobbly thing we call a self.

The enchantment is in the feeling and in the telling, and that is all.

“I am woman. I am invincible. I am pooped!”

A book is a collaboration between the one who reads and what is read and, at its best, that coming together is a love story like any other

Jane Austen, author of Persuasion, ironic observer, precise dissector of human feeling, stylist from heaven, and an author who did away with perverted monks but retained her own version of virtue rewarded.

I came to see her as someone I had idealized from afar, and I suspect that she had done the same with me.

Your fangs may not be the sharpest, but they have grown back and now you can act.

Glory to artifice, to the clown mask, to the Dracula face to hide the softness. Put on your armor and pick up your lance. Hail a bit of falseness if it protects you from the vipers.