They stood in silence, looking at floorboards and corners of cornices and other such insignificances, their curiosity and compassion at the ready. They were waiting so hard that when the door cracked and Bellman appeared, they jumped.
I have always been a reader; I have read at every stage of my life, and there has never been a time when reading was not my greatest joy.
I don’t pretend reality is the same for everyone.
A story so cherished it has to be dressed in casualness to disguise its significance in case the listener turned out to be unsympathetic.
Of course I loved books more than people.
When I was a child, books were everything. And so there is in me, always, a nostalgic, yearning for the lost pleasure of books. It is not a yearning that one ever expects to be fulfilled.
When one is nothing, one invents. It fills a void.
Reading can be dangerous.
One gets so used to one’s own horrors, one forgets how they must seem to other people.
Sometimes you can know things. Things about yourself. Things from before you can remember.
Emmeline didn’t call me anything. She didn’t need, for I was always there. You only need names for the absent.
There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner.
My genius is not so frail a thing that it cowers from the dirty fingers of newspapernen.
In this cruel world kindness should always be repaid.
Readers are fools. They believe all writing is autobiographical. And so it is, but not in the way they think. The writer’s life needs time to rot away before it can be used to nourish a work of fiction. it must be allowed to decay.
I still believe in stories. I still forget myself when I am in the middle of a good book. Books are for me, it must be said, the most important thing.
Art, its completeness, its formedness, its finishedness, had no power to console. Words on the other hand, were a lifeline. They left their hushed rhythm behind, a counter to the slow in and out of Emmeline’s breathing.
Tragedy alters everything.
There are times when the human face and body can express the yearning of the heart so accurately that you can, as they say, read them like a book. Do not abandon me.
The funeral was over, at last I could cry. Except that I couldn’t. My tears, kept in too long, had fossilized. They would have to stay in forever now.