There is only room in the lifeboat of your life for one, and you always choose yourself, and turn your parents into whatever it takes to keep you afl… - Anna Quindlen

Yet there was always in me, even when I was very small, the sense that I ought to be somewhere else. And wander I did, although, in my everyday life, I had nowhere to go and no imaginable reason on earth why I should want to leave. The buses took to the interstate without me, the trains sped by. So I wandered the world through books. I went to Victorian England in the the pages of 'Middlemarch' and 'A little Princess', and to Saint Petersburg before the fall of the tsar with 'Anna Karenina'. I went to Tara, and Manderley, and Thornfield Hall, all those great houses, with their high ceilings and high drama, as I read 'Gone with the Wind', 'Rebecca' and 'Jane Eyre'.

Sometimes I remind myself that I almost skipped the party, that I almost went to a different college, that the whim of a minute could have changed everything and everyone. Our lives, so settled, so specific, are built on happenstance.

People have writer's block not because they can't write, but because they despair of writing eloquently.