Quotes from Cathleen Schine

Empiricism and philosophy itself are both sensuous and sensual. The desire to know is desire.

Words and students, Laurel thought—they could be recalcitrant, out of order, trying to slip by without being noticed. But once you got them working together, unobtrusive and efficient, it was beautiful.

The night was mossy and hot...

bottle green Jaguar.

an unbroken line of unrelated people

If not a lost art, then an art that often rushes away from contemporary writers with all the excited energy of a disobedient dog. At least, that dog runs off from me. The best I have been able to do is run after it, try to head it off, circle back, call its name, and eventually just wait for it to come trotting back covered with mud. And the odd tick.

Once, just once, Sally had suggested that Daphne worked too hard. "And now with this big house. . ." Daphne had turned to the house, looked up at the three narrow stories, and said, "Only in New York would this be considered a big house. It has one bathroom." She turned back to her mother. "One bathroom," she said, in a kind of wonder.

It is difficult to notice your faces beyond that, partly because of the dazzling red hair but mostly because there are two of you. You understand this when you are older, when someone brings too many gifts to a birthday party or too many bottles of good wine to a dinner party, and the presents and the wine are undervalued in their own abundance. You are indistinct, undervalued in your own abundance. Sometimes

Why does ignorance make you feel superior, Daphne? Laurel thinks.

Copyediting is helping the words survive the misconceptions of their authors.

Ma come facevi ad avere un cuore quando tutti volevano averne un pezzo? E ci riuscivano, finché non te ne restava più niente. Ecco cosa intendeva. Tutti le sbranavano il cuore, come lupi. - Fin

Don was called Don Thumb throughout school. Maybe that was why Don was such a touchy son of a bitch.

I do not go out to dinner or to the movies with the neighbors, as I do with my friends. I don't make dates with them. I don't have to.

'Blue Nights' is a story of loss: simple, wrenching, inconsolable loss.

I've been fortunate in that I never actually read any Jane Austen until I was thirty, thus sparing myself several decades of the unhappiness of having no new Jane Austen novels to read.

In my stunted career as a scholar, I'd read promissory notes, papal bulls and guidelines for Inquisitorial interrogation. Dante, too. Boccaccio... But after 1400? Nihil.

'Emma' is my favorite Jane Austen novel - one of my favorite novels period; a novel about intelligence outsmarting itself, about a complicated, nuanced, irresistible heroine who does everything wrong.

Alice Munro is not only revered, she is cherished, her stories handled lovingly, turned over and over, gazed at and studied and breathed in with something approaching awe. She has never, over the years, written the way any of her contemporaries have.