A birth is not really a beginning. Our lives at the start are not really our own but only the continuation of someone else's story.

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

But she had that laugh, and the sound of it was so beautiful that when you heard it, it was as if your eyes saw her through your ears and she was transformed.

Tragedy alters everything.

She could not read a book for fear of the feelings she might find in it.

The doctor's wife wasn't a bad woman. She was sufficiently convinced of her own importance to believe that God actually did watch everything she did and listen to everything she said, and she was too taken up with rooting out the pride she was prone to feeling in her own holiness to notice any other failings she might have had. She was a do-gooder, which means that all the ill she did, she did without realizing it.

Without the past to cast its long shadow, might you see the future more clearly?