"... she saw herself to be: a demystifier, a critical observer of social processes and systems, an outsider who could …"

"cultivated the role of and/or witch, and — in the (1979) — rewrote the with pistol-toting Mother riding to the rescue…"

"My grandfather was the subject of my best stories. ... He behaved fantastically badly. ... My grandfather was a pries…"

"Grandfather's skirts would flop in the wind along the path and I would hang on. He often found things to do in the , …"

"... never frequent enough to explain the amount of wine he got through ... Eventually the Church stopped his supply a…"

"life seemed a perpetual-motion machine, or an effect of gravity, something cyclic and unstoppable."

"The only person who knew what was in the books was my mother's brother, Uncle Bill, and affected to despise them. He …"

"Though there are exceptions in all species, many useful border plants — s, s, members of the , s — have foliage that …"

"For an extrovert April scheme of brilliant yellow and red, intolerable to a melancholy poet such as Eliot, combine a …"

"As far as western Europe is concerned, the 's story began in Turkey, from where in the sixteenth century, European tr…"