I sound contemptuous, but I am not. I am interested--intrigued even--by the way time erases real lives, leaving only vague imprints. Blood and spirit fade away so that only names and dates remain.

All true readers have a book, a moment when real life is never going to be able to compete with fiction again.

There's a market for mysteries for adults. That feeling of opening a book and delving inside and not coming out until you've closed the book.

She doesn't know I cry for the changing times. That just as I reread favourite books, some small part of me hoping for a different ending, I find myself hoping against hope that the war will never come. That this time, somehow, it will leave us be.

I'm good with words, but not the spoken kind; I've often thought what a marvelous thing it would be if I could only conduct relationships on paper.

The world was an awfully large place and it wasn't easy to find a person who'd gone missing sixty years earlier, even if that person was oneself.

Cassandra wondered at the mind's cruel ability to toss up flecks of the past. Why, as she neared her life's end, her grandmother's head should ring with the voices of people long since gone. Was it always this way? Did those with passage booked on death's silent ship always scan the dock for faces of the long-departed?