There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner.

The funeral was over, at last I could cry. Except that I couldn't. My tears, kept in too long, had fossilized. They would have to stay in forever now.

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.

Of course I loved books more than people.

The tears I gratified him with were fake ones. Ones that set off my green eyes the way diamonds set off emeralds. And it worked. If you dazzled a man with green eyes, he will be so hypnotized that he won’t notice there is someone inside the eyes spying on him. – Vida Winters Page 268

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.

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