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

The hours between eight in the evening and one or two in the morning have always been my magic hours. Against the blue candlewick bedspread the white pages of my open book, illuminated by a circle of lamplight, were the gateway to another world.

But there can be no secrets in a house where there are children.

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

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.

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

There are too many books in the world to read in a single lifetime; you have to draw the line somewhere.