As for you, you are alive. But it's not the same as living.

Our lives are so important to us that we tend to think the story of them begins with our birth. First there was nothing, then I was born...Yet that is not so. Human lives are not pieces of string that can be separated out from a knot of others and laid out straight. Families are webs. Impossible to touch one part of it without setting the rest vibrating. Impossible to understand one part without having a sense of the whole. - Vida Winter

Prescription: 'Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes. Take ten pages, twice a day, til end of course.

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

When one is nothing, one invents. It fills a void.

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

Sometimes when you open the door to the past, what you confront is your destiny.