the word fantasy remains ambiguous, standing between the false, the foolish, the delusory, the shallows of the mind, and the mind’s deep connection with the real. On this threshold it sometimes faces one way, masked and costumed, frivolous, an escapist; then it turns, and we glimpse as it turns the face of an angel, bright truthful messenger, arise

What luck for a child to meet such a soul when she is young. What luck for a country to have a Mark Twain in its heart.

The story is the way the story is told.

Anybody who has been privileged to know real, solid, nonfuzzy happiness, and then lets some novelist or critic buffalo them into believing that they shouldn’t read about it because it’s commoner than unhappiness, inferior to unhappiness, less interesting than unhappiness,—where does my syntax lead me? Into judgmentalism. I shall extricate myself in

A poor reader can’t dance to the prose. But the best reader can’t make lame prose dance.

The limits of that language—shared assumptions of class, culture, education, ethics—both focus and shrink the scope of the fiction.

This spirited, intelligent, anarchic Eve reminds me of H. G. Wells’s Ann Veronica, an exemplary New Woman of 1909.

Knowledge sets us free, art sets us free. A great library is freedom.

“mental representations of things not actually present,” so that we can form a judgment of what world we live in and where we might be going in it, what we can celebrate, what we must fear.