I shall pray for your soul,' promised Nessarose. I shall wait for your shoes,' Elphie answered.

It was mild monsters like these that made Jack the Ripper go after young women, she decided: who could tolerate yielding the world to someone who behaved as if she had given birth to the very world herself?

Of course. You get everything from books.

There were more ways to live than the ones given by one's superiors

The answer of course, is that the clock isn't meant to measure earthly time, but the time of the soul. Redemption and condemnation time. For the soul, each instant is always a minute short of judgment.

When I write a book, I write very cleanly from page one to the last page. I hardly ever write out of sequence.

The future reshapes the memory of the past in the way it recalibrates significance; some episodes are advanced, others lose purchase.