Because if she let go of her grief even for a minute it would only hit her harder when she bumped into it again.

I don't always, or even usually, read stories from beginning to end. I start anywhere and proceed in either direction. A story is not like a road to follow, it's more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while.

I can't play bridge. I don't play tennis. All those things that people learn, and I admire, there hasn't seemed time for. But what there is time for is looking out the window.

If I decided to send this to you, where would I send it? When I think of writing the whole address on the envelope I am paralyzed. It's too painful to think of you in the same place with your life going on in the same way, minus me. And to think of you not there, you somewhere else but I don't know where that is, is worse.

She would live now, not read.

What she wants to do if she can get the time to do it, is not so much to live in the past as to open it up and get one good look at it".

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