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fe86df2
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Books help to form us. If you cut me open, you will find volume after volume, page after page, the contents of every one I have ever read, somehow transmuted and transformed into me. Alice in Wonderland. the Magic Faraway Tree. The Hound of the Baskervilles. The Book of Job. Bleak House. Wuthering Heights. The Complete Poems of W H Auden. The Tale of Mr Tod. Howard''s End. What a strange person I must be. But if the books I have read have h..
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Susan Hill |
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0550d9f
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I love the book. I love the feel of a book in my hands, the compactness of it, the shape, the size. I love the feel of paper. The sound it makes when I turn a page. I love the beauty of print on paper, the patterns, the shapes, the fonts. I am astonished by the versatility and practicality of The Book. It is so simple. It is so fit for its purpose. It may give me mere content, but no e-reader will ever give me that sort of added pleasure.
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reading
print-books
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Susan Hill |
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9de7963
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For I see that then I was still all in a state of innocence, but that innocence, once lost, is lost forever.
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Susan Hill |
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565d128
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Fast reading of a great novel will get us the plot. It will get us names, a shadowy idea of characters, a sketch of settings. It will not get us subtleties, small differentiations, depth of emotion and observation, multilayered human experience, the appreciation of simile and metaphor, any sense of context, any comparison with other novels, other writers. Fast reading will not get us cadence and complexities of style and language. It will n..
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reading
slow-reading
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Susan Hill |
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b5b334a
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A man may be accused of cowardice for fleeing away from all manner of physical dangers but when things supernatural, insubstantial and inexplicable threaten not only his safety and well-being but his sanity, his innermost soul, then retreat is not a sign of weakness but the most prudent course.
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Susan Hill |
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912dc14
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Fast reading of a great novel will get us the plot. It will get us names, a shadowy idea of characters, a sketch of settings. It will not get us subtleties, small differentiations, depth of emotion and observation, multilayered human experience, the appreciation of simile and metaphor, any sense of context, any comparison with other novels, other writers. Fast reading will not get us cadence and complexities of style and language. It will n..
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reading
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Susan Hill |
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31e26d4
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I have sat here at my desk, day after day, night after night, a blank sheet of paper before me, unable to lift my pen, trembling and weeping too.
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writing
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Susan Hill |
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f4e7dc4
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Memory is like a long, dark street, illuminated at intervals in a light so bright that it shows up every detail. And then one plunges into the dark stretch again.
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Susan Hill |
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d1868e3
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Whatever was about, whoever I had seen, and heard rocking, and who had passed me by just now, whoever had opened the locked door was not 'real'. No. But what was 'real'? At that moment I began to doubt my own reality.
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Susan Hill |
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69ba245
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My head reeled at the sheer and startling beauty, the wide, bare openness of it. The sense of space, the vastness of the sky above and on either side made my heart race, I would have travelled a thousand miles to see this. I had never imagined such a place.
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Susan Hill |
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a19b2f8
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I had always known in my heart that the experience would never leave me, that it was now woven into my very fibers, an inextricable part of my past, but I had hoped never to have to recollect it, consciously, and in full, ever again. Like an old wound, it gave off a faint twinge now and again, but less and less often, less and less painfully, as the years went on and my happiness, sanity and equilibrium were assured. Of late, it had been li..
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Susan Hill |
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ce04a0f
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I go downstairs and the books blink at me from the shelves. Or stare. In a trick of the light, a row of them seems to shift very slightly, like a curtain blown by the breeze through an open window. Red is next to blue is next to cream is adjacent to beige. But when I look again, cream is next to green is next to black. A tall book shelters a small book, a huge Folio bullies a cowering line of Quartos. A child's nursery rhyme book does not h..
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Susan Hill |
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3182cd0
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For a long time, I did not move from the dark, wood-panelled hall. I wanted company, and I had none, lights and warmth and a strong drink inside me, I needed reassurance. But, more than anything else, I needed an . It is remarkable how powerful a force simple curiosity can be. I had never realized that before now. In spite of my intense fear and sense of shock, I was consumed with the desire to find out exactly who it was that I had seen, ..
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Susan Hill |
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dda4c8a
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The lamps were lit, and a good fire crackled in the great stone fireplace. There was a discreet chink of china, the brightness of silver teapot and muffin cover, the comforting smell mingled of steaming hot water, toast and a little sweet tobacco.
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ghost-story
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Susan Hill |
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cb54141
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No, no, you have none of you any idea. This is all nonsense, fantasy, it is not like this. Nothing so blood-curdling and becreepered and crude - not so...so laughable. The truth is quite other, and altogether more terrible.
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Susan Hill |
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5754a75
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It was true that the ghastly sounds I had heard through the fog had greatly upset me but far worse was what emanated from and surrounded these things and arose to unsteady me, an atmosphere, a force - I do not exactly know what to call it - of evil and uncleanness, of terror and suffering, of malevolence and bitter anger
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Susan Hill |
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b811be2
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Some people make tunes, but it is lines that run like moving messages through my head. Whatever else I am saying and doing often has no bearing on this inner, verbal life.
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words
poetry
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Susan Hill |
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4b80f1f
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I knew him the least well, understood him scarcely at all, felt uneasy in his presence, and yet perhaps in a strange way loved him more deeply than any.
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Susan Hill |
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68ce77c
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I felt dead and sick inside.
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sick
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Susan Hill |
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bed0887
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I did not look about me, though sometimes I glanced up into the great bowl of the night sky and at the constellations scattered there and the sight was comforting and calming to me, things in the heavens seemed still to be aright and unchanged. But nothing else was, within me or all around. I knew now that I had entered some hitherto unimagined - indeed, unbelieved-in - realm of consciousness, that coming to this place had already changed m..
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Susan Hill |
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c34ef52
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There are some temptations that cannot be resisted, some lessons we never learn.
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Susan Hill |
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a988125
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She had a ghostly pallor and a dreadful expression, she wore clothes that were out of keeping with the styles of the present-day; she had kept her distance from me and she had not spoken. Something emanating from her still, silent presence, in each case by a grave, had communicated itself to me so strongly that I had felt indescribable repulsion and fear. And she had appeared and then vanished in a way that surely no real, living, fleshly h..
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Susan Hill |
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f21f14a
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czlowiek nie moze pozostawac bez konca w stanie wielkiego przerazenia. Albo emocje rosna do tego stopnia, ze pod naciskiem coraz okropniejszych wypadkow i skojarzen ono ogarnia go tak bardzo, ze ucieka badz popada w szalenstwo. Lu tez wewnetrzne poruszenie zacznie go stopniowo opuszczac, ustepujac miejsca rosnacemu opanowaniu.
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kobieta-w-czerni
przerażenie
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Susan Hill |
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23f533c
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he told me, married and with a child of his own.
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Susan Hill |
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bfa6661
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Mozna oskarzyc czlowieka o tchorzostwo, jesli ucieka przed wszelkiego rodzaju fizycznymi zagrozeniami. Ale gdy juz nie tylko jego bezpieczenstwu i dobremu samopoczuciu, ale wrecz jego zdrowiu i jego najtajniejszemu jestestwu zaczynaja zagrazac zjawiska nadprzyrodzone, bezcielesne i niewytlumaczalne, wtedy odwrot jest oznaka nie slabosci, ale tego, ze wybral rozsadna linie postepowania.
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zjawiska-paranormalne
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Susan Hill |
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8de2a7d
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It was nine-thirty on Christmas Eve. As I crossed the long entrance hall of Monk's Piece on my way from the dining room, where we had just enjoyed the first of the happy, festive meals, toward the drawing room and the fire around which my family were now assembled, I paused and then, as I often do in the course of an evening, went to the front door, opened it and stepped outside.
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Susan Hill |
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10633dd
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Come ...
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Susan Hill |
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5804370
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I was still all in a state of innocence, but that innocence once lost, is lost forever.
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Susan Hill |
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26a1446
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Suggested Reading Louis Bayard, The Black Tower; Sarah Blake, Grange House; F. G. Cottam, The House of Lost Souls; Michael Cox, The Glass of Time; Mark Frost, The List of Seven; John Harwood, The Ghost Writer; Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale.
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Susan Hill |