All True Readers Have A Book, A

My Fingers Positively Itched To Drift At Length Along Their Spines, To Arrive At One Whose Lure I Could Not Pass, To Pluck It Down, To Inch It Open, Then To Close My Eyes And Inhale The Soul-sparking Scent Of Old And Literate Dust.

True Love, It's Like An Illness. I Never Understood It Before. In Books And Plays. Poems. I Never Understood What Drove Otherwise Intelligent, Right-thinking People To Do Such Extravagant, Irrational Things. Now I Do. It's An Illness. You Can Catch It When You Least Expect. There's No Known Cure. And Sometimes, In Its Most Extreme, It's Fatal.

She Says There Are Stories Everywhere And That People Who Wait For The Right One To Come Along Before Setting Pen To Paper End Up With Very Empty Pages.

Time Had A Way Of Moulding People Into Shapes They Themselves No Longer Recognised.

You Must Learn To Know The Difference Between Tales And The Truth, My Liza, She Would Say. Fairy Tales Have A Habit Of Ending Too Soon. They Never Show What Happens Afterwards When The Prince And Princess Ride Off The Page.