And sometimes you do everything right and something bad just happens. It's as simple, and as scary, as that. - Anna Quindlen

A book — the book that was, for some reason, THE book — can be reread, unchanged. Only we have changed. And that makes all the difference.

While we pay lip service to the virtues of reading, the truth is that there is still in our culture something that suspects those who read too much, whatever reading too much means, of being lazy, aimless dreamers, people who need to grow up and come outside to where real life is, who think themselves superior in their separateness.

The beginning and the end are never really the journey of discovery for me. It is the middle that remains a puzzle until well into the writing. That's how life is most of the time, isn't it? You know where you are and where you hope to wind up. It's the getting there that's challenging.