Our clients' faces, with the customary outward paleness and inner glow of the book lover.

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.

Though my appetite for food grew frail, my hunger for books was constant.

Boys do not leave their boyhood behind when they leave off their school uniform.

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.

opening the book, i inhaled. the smell of old books, so sharp, so dry you can taste it.

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