Still in my coat and hat, I sank onto the stair to read the letter. (I never read without making sure I am in a secure position. I have been like this ever since the age of seven when, sitting on a high wall and reading The Water Babies, I was so seduced by the descriptions of underwater life that I unconsciously relaxed my muscles. Instead of being held buoyant by the water that so vividly surrounded me in my mind, I plummeted to the ground and knocked myself out. I can still feel the scar under my fringe now. Reading can be dangerous.)

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.

People with ambition don't give a damn what other people think of them.

What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring like a bear in the chimney?

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.

I don't pretend reality is the same for everyone.

When I was a child, books were everything. And so there is in me, always, a nostalgic, yearning for the lost pleasure of books. It is not a yearning that one ever expects to be fulfilled.