People have only one way to be.
Once upon a time there was a fairy godmother, but the rest of the time there was none. This story is about one of those other times.
The doctor's wife wasn't a bad woman. She was sufficiently convinced of her own importance to believe that God actually did watch everything she did and listen to everything she said, and she was too taken up with rooting out the pride she was prone to feeling in her own holiness to notice any other failings she might have had. She was a do-gooder, which means that all the ill she did, she did without realizing it.
All children mythologise their birth. It is a universal trait. You want to know someone? Heart, mind and soul? Ask him to tell you about when he was born. What you get won’t be the truth: it will be a story. And nothing is more telling than a story.
A birth is not really a beginning. Our lives at the start are not really our own but only the continuation of someone else's story.
Our clients' faces, with the customary outward paleness and inner glow of the book lover.
And sometimes then he sat with us for an hour or so, sharing our limbo, listening while I read. Books from any shelf, opened at any page, in which I would start and finish anywhere, mid-sentence sometimes. Wuthering Heights ran into Emma, which gave way to The Eustace Diamonds, which faded into Hard Times, which ceded to The Woman in White. Fragments. It didn't matter. Art, its completeness, its formedness, its finishedness, had no power to console. Words, on the other hand, were a lifeline.
People change, no use getting sentimental about it. Move on, find someone else.
A great man is made so for others.
Like all security, privacy is hard.
The essence of marketing today is to tell a story to people who want to hear it, in a way that resonates with them so they are likely to either respond or connect to you, or tell their friends.