Emmeline didn't call me anything. She didn't need, for I was always there. You only need names for the absent.

People with ambition don't give a damn what other people think of them.

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.

To anyone who took the trouble to look, I was plainly visible, but when people are expecting to see nothing, that is usually what they see.

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

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 yet I cannot pretend that the reading I have done in my adult years matches in its impact on my soul the reading I did as a child. I still believe in stories. I still forget myself when I am in the middle of a good book. Yet it is not the same.

There are cultures in which it is believed that a name contains all a persons mystical power. That a name should be known only to God and to the person who holds it and to very few privileged others. To pronounce such a name either ones own or someone else's is to invite jeopardy. This it seemed was such a name.