I imagined my soul taking in these words like silicated water in the Petrified Forest, turning my wood to patterned agate. I liked it when my mother shaped me this way. I thought clay must feel happy in the good potter's hand.

A womans mistakes are different from a girls

She laughed so easily when she was happy. But also when she was sad.

If sinners where so unhappy, why would they prefer their suffering? But now I knew why. Without my wounds, who was I?

How right that the body changed over time, becoming a gallery of scars, a canvas of experience, a testament to life and one's capacity to endure it.

My father was an engineer - he wasn't literary, not a writer or a journalist, but he was one of the world's great readers. Every two weeks, he'd take me to our local branch library and pull books off the shelf for me, stacking them up in my arms - 'Have you read this? And this? And this?"

These people picked you up and played with you and then left you lying in the rain