Quote of the Month - March 2012

"There was a man dwelt by a churchyard.
   Well, no, okay, it wasn't always a man; in this particular case it was a woman. There was a woman dwelt by a churchyard.
   Though, to be honest, nobody really uses that word nowadays. Everybody says cemetery. And nobody says dwelt any more. In other words:
   There was once a woman who lived by a cemetery. Every morning when she woke up she looked out of her back window and saw -
   Actually, no. There was once a woman who lived by - no, in - a second-hand bookshop. She lived in the flat on the first floor and ran the shop which took up the whole of downstairs.There she sat, day after day, among the skulls and the bones of second-hand books, the stacks and shelves of them spanning the lengths and breadths of the long and narrow rooms, the piles of them swaying up, precarious like rootless towers, towards the cracked plaster of the ceiling."

From The Whole Story and other stories, the short story "the universal story" by Ali Smith