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

What better place to kill time than a library?

There are cultures in which it is believed that a name contains all a persons mystical power. That a name should be known only to God and to the person who holds it and to very few privileged others. To pronounce such a name either ones own or someone else's is to invite jeopardy. This it seemed was such a name.

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

One needs no particular talent to be polite. On the contrary, being nice is what's left when you've failed at everything else.

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

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