“Does something amuse you?' asked Uncle Montague.'I was merely reminding myself, Uncle, that I am getting too old to be so easily frightened by stories.''Really?' said Uncle Montague with a worrying degree of doubt in his voice. 'You think there is an age at which you might become immune to fear?”

“Give me a funeral over a wedding any day,.' said Uncle Montague with a sigh. 'The conversation is almost always superior.”

“Just because something is told as a story and that story is part legend or myth, or feat of imagination, does not mean there is no truth in it.”

“I stood a little self-consciously. I was of an age when I was still unsure of myself in such formal matters as greetings and partings.”

“After all, it was only a story,' I said, determined to prove her wrong. 'All manner of terrible things may happen in a story. They may be startling at the time, but it passes. One gets caught up in the narrative, but the dangers aren't real, are they? Things happen in any way the storyteller chooses. It is all just made up.”

“In my confused state I wondered if I had not died and gone to hell. And if this was the case, I wished that I had been allowed more opportunities to sin, for this seemed a rather excessive judgement on what had been a frankly dull and blameless life. But I was not dead. I could see that now.”

“Writers were a strange sort; I knew that much from the newspapers.”