The Past Is Our Ultimate Privacy; We

You Have This Comet Trail Of Your Own Lived Life, Sparks From Which Arrive In The Head All The Time, Whether You Want Them Or Not - Life Has Been Lived But It Is Still All Going On, In The Mind For Better And For Worse.

I Believe That The Experience Of Childhood Is Irretrievable. All That Remains, For Any Of Us, Is A Headful Of Brilliant Frozen Moments, Already Dangerously Distorted By The Wisdoms Of Maturity.

Born In Jerusalem, Wadie Said Went From Being A Dragoman To A Salesman In The United States And Thence To A Hugely Successful Businessman In Egypt.

The Day Is Refracted, And The Next And The One After That, All Of Them Broken Up Into A Hundred Juggled Segments, Each Brilliant And Self-contained So That The Hours Are No Longer Linear But Assorted Like Bright Sweets In A Jar.

Forever, Reading Has Been Central, The Necessary Fix, The Support System. Her Life Has Been Informed By Reading. She Has Read Not Just For Distraction, Sustenance, To Pass The Time, But She Has Read In A State Of Primal Innocence, Reading For Enlightenment, For Instruction, Even. ... She Is As Much A Product Of What She Has Read As Of The Way In Which She Has Lived; She Is Like Millions Of Others Built By Books, For Whom Books Are An Essential Foodstuff, Who Could Starve Without.