Though my appetite for food grew frail, my hunger for books was constant.

People whose lives are not balanced by a healthy love of money suffer from an appalling obsession with personal integrity.

What better place to kill time than a library?

And sometimes then he sat with us for an hour or so, sharing our limbo, listening while I read. Books from any shelf, opened at any page, in which I would start and finish anywhere, mid-sentence sometimes. Wuthering Heights ran into Emma, which gave way to The Eustace Diamonds, which faded into Hard Times, which ceded to The Woman in White. Fragments. It didn't matter. Art, its completeness, its formedness, its finishedness, had no power to console. Words, on the other hand, were a lifeline.

Emmeline didn't call me anything. She didn't need, for I was always there. You only need names for the absent.

She was a do-gooder, which means that all the ill she did, she did without realizing it.

Boys do not leave their boyhood behind when they leave off their school uniform.