I don't pretend reality is the same for everyone.

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

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 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.

For me to see is to read. It has always been that way.

Tragedy alters everything.

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