There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner. Wind themselves around your limbs like spider silk, and when you are so enthralled you cannot move, they pierce your skin, enter your blood, numb your thoughts. Inside you they work their magic.

A birth is not really a beginning. Our lives at the start are not really our own but only the continuation of someone else's story.

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

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.

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

I read *old* novels. The reason is simple. I prefer proper endings.

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