There is a proverbial saying chiefly concerned with warning against too closely calculating the numerical value of un-hatched chicks.

I imagine the world dividing into the people who want to feed their children, and the ones shooting at them.

I was a reader. I loved reading. Reading things gave me pleasure. I was very good at most subjects in school, not because I had any particular aptitude in them, but because normally on the first day of school they'd hand out schoolbooks, and I'd read them--which would mean that I'd know what was coming up, because I'd read it.

When things get tough, this is what you should do: Make good art. I'm serious. Husband runs off with a politician -- make good art. Leg crushed and then eaten by a mutated boa constrictor -- make good art. IRS on your trail -- make good art. Cat exploded -- make good art. Someone on the Internet thinks what you're doing is stupid or evil or it's all been done before -- make good art.

But standing in that hallway, it was all coming back to me. Memories were waiting at the edges of things, beckoning to me.

Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for allowing us to function as more than self-obsessed individuals.

When most people said "I'm psychic, you see," they meant "I have an overactive but unoriginal imagination/wear black nail varnish/talk to my budgie;" when Anathema said it, it sounded as though she was admitting to a hereditary disease which she'd much prefer not to have.