Gardeners, I think, dream bigger dreams than Emperor's.

- Mary Cantwell

Mystery fiction is, after all, a substitute for tranquilizers, strong drink, and bad, if diverting, companions. One slips into bed ... onto the train…

- Mary Cantwell

I was, after all, the daughter of a man who believed that to be involved with books was to live at the heart of light, and the former wife of a man w…

- Mary Cantwell

the hymns were born in the fifteenth or sixteenth century or earlier, and listening to them was like licking an icicle: the same chill, the same puri…

- Mary Cantwell

Silence was the cure, if only temporarily, silence and geography. But of what was I being cured? I do not know, have never known. I only know the cur…

- Mary Cantwell

Meanwhile, as we read, two little girls slept as if couched on zephyrs on the south side of the parlor floor, in a room that had bunny wallpaper...an…

- Mary Cantwell

In giving our daughter life, her father and I had also given her death, something I hadn't realized until that new creature flailed her arms in what …

- Mary Cantwell

Like most people, most Westerners anyway, I have a sneaking suspicion I am immortal.

- Mary Cantwell

I had wanted to come back to Greenwich Village ever since I had left Waverly Place, and since moving to West Eleventh Street, I have never lived anyp…

- Mary Cantwell