"He felt as though he was prying, and as though he was being uselessly urged on by some violent emotion of curiosity—not greed, curiosity, more fundamental even than sex, the desire for knowledge." Chapter 5, Possession, p. 92.

" 'You know, if you read the collected letters of any writer—if you read her biography—you will always get a sense that there's something missing, something biographers don't have access to, the real thing, the crucial thing, the thing that really mattered to the poet herself. There are always letters that were destroyed. The letters, usually. These may be those letters, in Christabel's life. He—Ash—obviously thought they were. He says so.' " Chapter 5, Possession, p. 100.

"All of us have things in our lives which we know in this brief, useful allusive way, and neglect deliberately to explore. Mrs. Cropper sat in the desert...