Where were we? I've forgotten. He was deciding whether to cut her throat or love her forever. Right. Yes. The usual choices. - Margaret Atwood

He was deciding whether to cut her throat or love her forever.

The past is so much safer, because whatever's in it has already happened. It can't be changed; so, in a way, there's nothing to dread.

I made choices, and then, having made them, I had fewer choices.

I remember a television program I once saw [...] I must have been seven or eight, too young to understand it. It was the sort of thing my mother liked to watch: historical, educational. She tried to explain it to me afterwards, to tell me that the things in it had really happened, but to me it was only a story. I thought someone had made it up. I suppose all children think that, about any history before their own. If it's only a story, it becomes less frightening.