Mr Lipwig, there's a lady in the hall to see you and we've thanked her for not smoking three times and she's still doing it!

If you don't turn your life into a story, you just become a part of someone else's story.

The stories never said why she was wicked. It was enough to be an old woman, enough to be all alone, enough to look strange because you have no teeth. It was enough to be called a witch. If it came to that, the book never gave you the evidence of anything. It talked about "a handsome prince"... was he really, or was it just because he was a prince that people called handsome? As for "a girl who was as beautiful as the day was long"... well, which day? In midwinter it hardly ever got light! The stories don't want you to think, they just wanted you to believe what you were told.

Them as can do has to do for them as can't. And someone has to speak up for them as has no voices.

The best thing I ever did with my life was stand up and say I've got Alzheimer's.

But there was more to it than that. As the Amazing Maurice said, it was just a story about people and rats. And the difficult part of it was deciding who the people were, and who were the rats.

She was also, by the standards of other people, lost. She would not see it like that. She knew where she was, it was just that everywhere else didn't.