It seems that she can survive, she can prosper, if she has London around her. - Michael Cunningham

You want to give him the book of his own life, the book that will locate him, parent him, arm him for the changes.

She could have had a life as potent and dangerous as literature itself.

Maybe it’s not, in the end, the virtues of others that so wrenches our hearts as it is the sense of almost unbearably poignant recognition when we see them at their most base, in their sorrow and gluttony and foolishness. You need the virtues, too — some sort of virtues — but we don’t care about Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina or Raskolnikov because they’re good. We care about them because they’re not admirable, because they’re us, and because great writers have forgiven them for it.