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

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.

A story so cherished it has to be dressed in casualness to disguise its significance in case the listener turned out to be unsympathetic.

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

I have always been a reader; I have read at every stage of my life and there has never been a time when reading was not my greatest joy. And yet I cannot pretend that the reading I have done in my adult years matches in its impact on my soul the reading I did as a child. I still believe in stories. I still forget myself when I am in the middle of a good book. Yet it is not the same.

For it must be very lonely being dead.

Sometimes you can know things. Things about yourself. Things from before you can remember.