The funeral was over, at last I could cry. Except that I couldn't. My tears, kept in too long, had fossilized. They would have to stay in forever now.

I am human. Like all humans, I do not remember my birth. By the time we wake up to ourselves, we are little children, and our advent is something that happened an eternity ago, at the beginning of time. We live like latecomers to the theater; we must catch up as best we can, divining the begging from the shape of later events. - Vida Winter

I know there are people who don't read fiction at all, and I find it hard to understand how they can bear to be inside the same head all the time.

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

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

Fate, at first so amenable, so reasonable, so open to negotiation, ends up by exacting a cruel revenge for happiness.

When one is nothing, one invents. It fills a void.