“I remember the feeling. Whenever my father got so absorbed in a book that we might have been in visible I felt like taking a pair of scissors and cutting it up.”

“She scissored the curls away, and - toms, grow easily sentimental over their haircuts, but I remember this sensation very vividly - it was not like she was cutting hair, it was as if I had a pair of wings beneath my shoulder-blades, that the flesh had all grown over, and she was slicing free...”

“She felt like a fictional character who'd escaped the book in which her creator had carefully and kindly trapped her, taken a pair of scissors to her outline and leaped, free...”

“Many years ago, when I used to smoke, my lighter was often easier to find than my scissors. If I couldn't find the scissors, or was feeling too lazy to get up, I used the lighter to burn the yarn in one place to break it. Other than the smell, this worked fairly well. Later, when I found my scissors, I would cut off the little charred bits.One day, I was knitting a cotton facecloth and needed to cut the end. I flicked my lighter, expecting to singe the one spot, thus breaking the yarn.I will remember that cotton is highly flammable, and that the knitting Fates punish laziness. I will also remember that a flaming facecloth can be extinguished with a cup of coffee...in a pinch.”

“i will always remember what my life might have been like if i had married a man who loved me with undying passion. perhaps i might not have been so vunerabel to the attension of a rake. ”

“Like most, I was a solitary boy at first, keeping to my books and weeping in the hedgerows whenever I could get away on my own. Surely, I thought, I must be the saddest child in the world; that there must be something innately horrid about me to cause my father to cast me off so heartlessly. I believed that if I could discover what it was, there might be a chance of putting things right, of somehow making it up to him.”