Dear books, please take me to the places where my feet can't take me.

Whatever that place is, I don't much care -- not unless a book has happened there.

One of my favorite places on the planet is a place in northern Michigan: Long Lake in Traverse City.

We all have these places where shy humiliations gambol on sunny afternoons.

They lived freely among the students, they argued with the men over philosophical, sociological and artistic matters, they were just as good as the men themselves: only better, since they were women.

Books didn't figure in my family very much. . . . However, my grandmother's attic was full of old, old books . . . In the summers we would go to North Dakota to visit her, and I would get in that attic and read everything in sight. That's when the passion started. I was maybe eight or nine.