Every year, when you're a child, you become a different person.

Why is it a surprise to find that people other than ourselves are able to tell lies?

It's as if tendencies that seem most deeply rooted in our minds, most private and singular, have come in as spores on the prevailing wind, looking for any likely place to land, any welcome.

For years and years I thought that stories were just practice, till I got time to write a novel.

Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories - and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.

It was at this time that she entirely gave up on reading. The covers of books looked like coffins to her, either shabby or ornate, and what was inside them might as well have been dust.

In your life there are a few places, or maybe only the one place, where something happened, and then there are all the other places.