I like to pass unnoticed, which is why I hope that I am not deprived of old age.  I aspire to Miss Marple’s persona:  to be exactly as I am, decrepit nature yet supernature in one, equally alert on the damp ground and in the turbulent air.  Perhaps I don’t have to wait for old age for that invisible trespass and pedestrian tread, insensible of mortality and desperately mortal.

I will stay in the fray, in the revel of ideas and risk; learning failing, wooing, grieving, trusting, working, reposing—in this sin of language and lips.

—Gillian Rose