She was a do-gooder, which means that all the ill she did, she did without realizing it.

But silence is not a natural environment for stories. They need words. Without them they grown pale, sicken and die. And then they haunt you.

People whose lives are not balanced by a healthy love of money suffer from an appalling obsession with personal integrity.

I still believe in stories. I still forget myself when I am in the middle of a good book. Books are for me, it must be said, the most important thing.

Once upon a time there was a fairy godmother, but the rest of the time there was none. This story is about one of those other times.

The doctor's wife wasn't a bad woman. She was sufficiently convinced of her own importance to believe that God actually did watch everything she did and listen to everything she said, and she was too taken up with rooting out the pride she was prone to feeling in her own holiness to notice any other failings she might have had. She was a do-gooder, which means that all the ill she did, she did without realizing it.

All morning I struggled with the sensation of stray wisps of one world seeping through the cracks of another. Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes -- characters even -- caught in the fibers of your clothes, and when you open the new book, they are still with you.