“I suppose that my work is always mourning something, the loss of a paradise—not the thing that comes after you die, but the thing that you had before.”

Explaining her remark that Henry James was “the greatest American female novelist”: ”Sometimes I try to lighten the gloom of discussions but I notice that no one laughs. Instead you see a few people writing down the name.”

I leave, for now, that scene that switched on a certain channel in my being.