It was always the view of my parents...that hot weather encouraged loose morals among young people.

Shall there be womanly times? Or shall we die?

There did not have to be a moral. She need only show separate minds, as alive as her own, struggling with the idea that other minds were equally alive. It wasn't only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding, above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you. And only in a story could you enter these different minds and show how they had an equal value. That was the only moral a story need have.

At the back of my mind I had a sense of us sitting about waiting for some terrible event, and then I would remember that it had already happened.

...falling in love could be achieved in a single word—a glance.

Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion, and it is the beginning of morality.

Nothing was to be lost by beginning at the beginning.