She hadn't wanted to be loved carefully, only well.

. . . companions were to be valued, wherever one found them.

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.

It is a cruel, ironical art, photography. The dragging of captured moments into the future; moments that should have been allowed to be evaporate into the past; should exist only in memories, glimpsed through the fog of events that came after. Photographs force us to see people before their future weighed them down.

In retrospect, it seems like everything in my life led to me becoming a writer. I just didn't realise it at the time.

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

She hadn't wanted to be loved carefully, only well.