the hymns were born in the fifteenth or sixteenth century or earlier, and listening to them was like licking an icicle: the same chill, the same purity.

Gardeners, I think, dream bigger dreams than Emperor's.

Like most people, most Westerners anyway, I have a sneaking suspicion I am immortal.

Mystery fiction is, after all, a substitute for tranquilizers, strong drink, and bad, if diverting, companions. One slips into bed ... onto the train ... into the chair in the sickroom ... and is suddenly transported to a place where light fights dark and wins. When the story's over, one is left without a hangover, without remorse. Can any other opiate make that claim?

I was, after all, the daughter of a man who believed that to be involved with books was to live at the heart of light, and the former wife of a man who shared his faith.

Silence was the cure, if only temporarily, silence and geography. But of what was I being cured? I do not know, have never known. I only know the cure. Silence, and no connections except to landscape.

the hymns were born in the fifteenth or sixteenth century or earlier, and listening to them was like licking an icicle: the same chill, the same purity.