Write what you know. Every guide for the aspiring author advises this. Because I live in a long-settled rural place, I know certain things. I know the feel of a newborn lamb's damp, tight-curled fleece and the sharp sound a well-bucket chain makes as it scrapes on stone. But more than these material things, I know the feelings that flourish in small communities. And I know other kinds of emotional truths that I believe apply across the centuries.

I had been afraid of breast cancer, as I suspect most women are, from the time I hit adolescence. At that age, when our emerging sexuality is our central preoccupation, the idea of disfigurement of a breast is particularly horrifying.

Book burnings. Always the forerunners. Heralds of the stake, the ovens, the mass graves.

We are not the only animal that mourns; apes do, and elephants, and dogs. Yet we are the only one that tortures.

To know a man's library is, in some measure, to know a man's mind.

It is human nature to imagine, to put yourself in another's shoes. The past may be another country. But the only passport required is empathy.

If there is one class of person I have never quite trusted, it is a man who knows no doubt.