Of course I loved books more than people.

What better place to kill time than a library?

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.

Our clients' faces, with the customary outward paleness and inner glow of the book lover.

Though my appetite for food grew frail, my hunger for books was constant.

People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there is an exception to this annihilation. For in the books they write they continue to exist.

No matter how banal the contents, there is always something that touches me. For someone now dead once thought these words significant enough to write them down.

My mother says that after I first visited the home of the man I later married, she knew it was serious when I told her, 'Mum, he has more books than me!' So, books are at the very heart of my life.