I shall start at the beginning. Though of coarse, the beginning is never where you think it is.

I have always been a reader; I have read at every stage of my life, and there has never been a time when reading was not my greatest joy

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

One gets so used to one's own horrors, one forgets how they must seem to other people.

Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in in ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic. As one tends the graves of the dead, so I tend the books. And every day I open a volume or two, read a few lines or pages, allow the voices of the forgotten dead to resonate inside my head.

To anyone who took the trouble to look, I was plainly visible, but when people are expecting to see nothing, that is usually what they see.

Politeness. Now there's a poor man's virtue if ever there was one. What's so admirable about inoffensiveness, I should like to know. After all, it's easily achieved. One needs no particular talent to be polite. On the contrary, being nice is what's left when you've failed at everything else. People with ambition don't give a damn what other people think about them.