“She read Dickens in the same spirit she would have eloped with him.”

“She would live now, not read.”

“She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live. She read books as one would breathe ether, to sink in and die.”

“She likes to read, she reads all the time, and she prefers to be reading several things at once, she says it gives endless perspective and dimension.”

“All reading is good reading. And all reading of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens is sublime reading.”

“She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.”

“She read and read and read, but she was stuffing herself with the letters on the page like an unhappy child stuffing itself with chocolate. They didn’t taste bad, but she was still unhappy.”

“I write what I would like to read – what I think other women would like to read. If what I write makes a woman in the Canadian mountains cry and she writes and tells me about it, especially if she says ‘I read it to Tom when he came in from work and he cried too,’ I feel I have succeeded.”

“She read everything.”

“When she wanted to escape her life, she read books”