When a book leaves its author's desk it changes. Even before anyone has read it, before eyes other than its creator's have looked upon a single phras… - Salman Rushdie

"Otto Cone as a man of seventy-plus years jumped into an open lift shaft and died. Now this was a subject which Alicia Cone, who would readily discuss the most taboo matters refused to touch upon. Why does a survivor of the camps live forty years then complete the job the monsters didn't get done? Does great evil eventually triumph no matter how strenuously it is resisted? Does it leave a sliver of ice in the blood working its way through until it reaches the heart? Or worse, can a man's death be incompatible with his life? Alicia, who's first response on hearing of her father's death had been fury, flung such questions as these at her mother, who stone-faced beneath a broad-brimmed black hat said only, "You have inherited his lack of restraint my dear.

"Without water we are nothing", the traveler thought. "Even an emperor, denied water, would swiftly turn to dust. Water is the real monarch and we are all its slaves."

It's fun to read things when you don't know all the words. Even children love it. One of the things any great children's writer will tell you is that children like it if in books designed for their age group there is a vocabulary just slightly bigger than theirs. So they come up against weird words, and the weird words excite them. If you describe a small girl in a story as "loquacious," it works so much better than “talkative.” And then some little girl will read the book and her sister will be shooting her mouth off and she will say to her sister, "Don't be so loquacious." It is a whole new weapon in her arsenal.