But in my humble opinion, a house needs a good party once in a while; remind folks it exists.

It's a funny thing, character, the way it brands people as they age, rising from within to leave its scar.

A way of looking at you that told you she was listening, that she understood all you were saying, and all you weren't.

Children don’t require of their parents a past and they find something faintly unbelievable, almost embarrassing, in parental claims to a prior existence.

Round and round the questions flew, until finally I found myself standing at the open door of a bookshop. It’s natural in times of great perplexity, I think, to seek out the familiar, and the high shelves and long rows of neatly lined-up spines were immensely reassuring. Amid the smell of ink and binding, the dusty motes in beams of strained sunlight, the embrace of warm, tranquil air, I felt that I could breathe more easily.

His words had tossed the book that was her life into the air and the pages had been blown into disarray, could never be put back together to tell the same story.

He had the vague sense of standing on a threshold, the crossing of which would change everything.