I reached for the prescription. In a vigorous scrawl, he inked: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes. Take ten pages, twice a day, till end of course.
He was the first of my ghosts.
For all my biographical projects I have kept a box of lives. A box of index cards containing the details—name, occupation, dates, place of residence and any other piece of information that seems relev...
And sometimes then he sat with us for an hour or so, sharing our limbo, listening while I read. Books from any shelf, opened at any page, in which I would start and finish anywhere, mid-sentence somet...
And my own feelings? Shame. For I had lied. Of course I loved books more than people. Of course I valued Jane Eyre over the anonymous stranger with his hand on the lever. Of course all of Shakespeare...
When one is nothing, one invents. It fills a void.
Well, then, the cressman concluded sagely, just ’cause a thing’s impossible don’t mean it can’t happen.
The tears I gratified him with were fake ones. Ones that set off my green eyes the way diamonds set off emeralds. And it worked. If you dazzled a man with green eyes, he will be so hypnotized that he...
That name was Adeline March.
Pigs were funny creatures. You could almost think they were human the way they looked at you sometimes. Or was the pig remembering something? Yes, she realized, that was it. The pig looked exactly as...
One should always pay attention to ghosts, shouldn’t one, Miss Lea?
My gripe is not with lovers of the truth but with truth herself. What succor, what consolation is there in truth, compared to a story? What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is ro...
Life is compost. You think that a strange thing to say, but it's true. All my life and all my experience, the events that have befallen me, the people I have known, all my memories, dreams, fantasies,...
I was in a kind of no-man's-land, a place between places. The mind plays all sorts of tricks, gets up to all kinds of things while we ourselves are slumbering in a white zone that looks for all the wo...
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. And yet I cannot pretend that the reading I have done in my adu...
For at eight o’clock the world came to an end. It was reading time. The hours between eight in the evening and one or two in the morning have always been my magic hours.
Art, its completeness, its formedness, its finishedness, had no power to console. Words, on the other hand, were a lifeline.
A story so cherished it has to be dressed in casualness to disguise its significance in case the listener turned out to be unsympathetic.
A story so cherished it had to be dressed in casualness to disguise its significance in case the listener turned out to be unsympathetic.
You leave the previous book with idea's and themes - characters even - caught in the fibers of your clothing - and when you open a new book, they are still with you.