Sublime

Tillie Olsen wrote: “In the twenty years I bore and reared my children . . . the simplest circumstances for creation did not exist.” It was a physical problem, a time problem; it was also a question of selfhood. “The obligation to be physically attractive and patient and nurturing and docile and sensitive and deferential . . . contradicts and must

It isn’t so much that geniuses make it look easy; it’s that they make it look fast.

I like writing that is unsummarizable, a kernel that cannot be condensed, that must be uttered exactly as it is.

I don’t love writing; I love having a problem I believe I might someday write my way out of.

cholera: in her notebook, ‘Quarry for Middlemarch’, George Eliot noted the appearance of cholera in England in 1831–2.

some small plump brownish person of firm but quiet carriage, who looks about her, but does not suppose that anybody is looking at her. If she has a broad face and square brow, well-marked eyebrows and curly dark hair, a certain expression of amusement in her glance which her mouth keeps the secret of, and for the rest features entirely insignifican

‘I will write to him, then. But my cousins are bores.’ It seemed magnificent to Rosamond to be able to speak so slightingly of a baronet’s family, and she felt much contentment in the prospect of being able to estimate them contemptuously on her own account.