“She'd become an English major for the purest and dullest of reasons: because she loved to read.”

“Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.”

“No one else knew how she'd longed for extinction, how much part of her had hungered simply to quit. To end. She'd once intended, coldly and logically, to do just that… She'd sacrificed her naval career… and a corner of her mind suspected she'd actually wanted to sacrifice it — that she'd planned to use the loss of the vocation she loved so much as one more reason to end her dreary existence. It had seemed only reasonable then; now the memory was one more coal of contempt for her own weakness, her willingness to surrender to her own pain when she'd always refused to surrender to anyone else.”

“Love is a pearl of purest hue,
But stormy waves are round it;
And dearly may a woman rue,
The hour that she found it.”

“But usually, I watched Linda read. I couldn't believe she'd read so much in summer! Sometimes she laughed, reading her book, and one time she even cried. I didn't know how anyone could make such a big deal about books.”

“Love must give warmth and unfading color to every day of the dullest life.”

“When reading a book, be very certain that you never go past a word you do not fully understand. The only reason a person gives up a study or becomes confused or unable to learn is because he or she has gone past a word that was not understood.”

“Most English speakers do not have the writer's short fuse about seeing or hearing their language brutalized. This is the main reason, I suspect, that English is becoming the world's universal tongue: English-speaking natives don't care how badly others speak English as long as they speak it. French, once considered likely to become the world's lingua franca, has lost popularity because those who are born speaking it reject this liberal attitude and become depressed, insulted or insufferable when their language is ill used.”

“She didn't know how much she'd been hoping that he still loved her, until she felt how much it hurt to realize he didn't.”

“Y'all don't treat women fair
She read about herself in the bible
Believing she the reason sin is here”