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

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.

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

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

What better way to get to know someone than through her choice and treatment of books?

Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in in ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic. As one tends the graves of the dead, so I tend the books. And every day I open a volume or two, read a few lines or pages, allow the voices of the forgotten dead to resonate inside my head.

Reading can be dangerous.