It's a responsibility of the writer to get the reader out of the story somehow.

This was the time in her life that she fell upon books as the only door out of her cell. They became half her world.

I don't have a plan for a story when I sit down to write. I would get quite bored carrying it out.

You have to protect yourself from sadness. Sadness is very close to hate. Let me tell you this. This is the thing I learned. If you take in someone else's poison – thinking you can cure them by sharing it – you will instead store it within you. Those men in the desert were smarter than you. They assumed he could be useful. So they saved him, but when he was no longer useful they left him.

Everyone has to scratch on walls somewhere or they go crazy

We own the country we grow up in, or we are aliens and invaders.

He has been disassembled by her. And if she has brought him to this, what has he brought her to?