Now that I knew fear, I also knew it was not permanent. As powerful as it was, its grip on me would loosen. It would pass.

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that.

She had always been a reader… but now she was obsessed. Since her discovery of the book hoard downstairs from her job, she’d been caught up in one such collection of people and their doings after the next…The pleasure of this sort of life – bookish, she supposed it might be called, a reading life – had made her isolation into a rich and even subversive thing. She inhabited one consoling or horrifying persona after another…That she was childless and husbandless and poor meant less once she picked up a book. Her mistakes disappeared into it. She lived with an invented force.

Add there was that moment when my mother and father walked in the door disguised as old people. I thought the miles in the car had bent them, dulled their eyes, even grayed and whitened their hair and caused their hands and voices to tremble. At the same time, I found, as I rose form the chair, I'd gotten old along with them.

I tried out the unfamiliar syllables. They fit. They cracked in my ears like a fist through ice.

Time was rushing around me like water around a big wet rock. The only difference is, I was not so durable as stones. Very quickly I would be smoothed away.

The Internet, which seems now so embedded and personal and crucial to our lives, isn't at all - we really shouldn't think of it that way.