He had lived and acted on the assumption that he was alone, and now he saw that he had not been. What he had done made others suffer. No matter how much he would long for them to forget him, they would not be able to. His family was a part of him, not only in blood, but in spirit.

It would have been impossible for me to have told anyone what I derived from these novels, for it was nothing less than a sense of life itself.

Reading was like a drug, a dope. The novels created moods in which I lived for days.

If a man confessed anything on his death bed, it was the truth; for no man could stare death in the face and lie.

I did not know if the story was factually true or not, but it was emotionally true [...].

there are times when life's ends are so raveled that reason and sense cry out that we stop and gather them together again before we can proceed

What could I dream of that had the barest possibility of coming true? I could think of nothing. And, slowly, it was upon exactly that nothingness that my mind began to dwell, that constant sense of wanting without having, of being hated without reason.