Outsiders

No one, of course, can explain genius.

In a period when a woman’s reputation was her treasured security, each of these five lost it.

The outsiders who have meant most to me tell us not who we are, but who we might be.

We come to know a lasting poet or novelist more intimately than we do people of our own place and time; closer in a way than love and friendship.

I made friends with characters in books.

Souls live on in perpetual echoes

As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.

I keep thinking what you’re doing, and have to stop – it makes me want to kiss you so . . .

Men, she claims, were not yet ready to hear what women could tell them.

I can’t give myself. Passion leaves me cold.