Basically what we have here is a dreamer. Somebody out of touch with reality. When she jumped, she probably thought she'd fly

our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.

She could become a spinster, like Emily Dickinson, writing poems full of dashes and brilliance, and never gaining weight.

But that was in the days when they expected perils to come from without, and nothing made less sense by that time than a survival room buried in a house itself becoming one big coffin.

I hadn't gotten old enough yet to realize that living sends a person not into the future but back into the past, to childhood and before birth, finally, to commune with the dead. You get older, you puff on the stairs, you enter the body of your father. From there it's only a quick jump to your grandparents, and then before you know it you're time traveling. In this life we grow backwards.

Sourmelina's secret (as Aunt Zo put it): 'Lina was one of those women they named the island after.

We're all well-acquainted with depression, we all know what the low moods are, but the mania was not something I knew much about. I didn't know that it would make someone dress extravagantly or start to pun, and to stay up and drink.