A life as dull as one's parents'

Gloria's parents led drab, listless lives that the wearing of pearl-and-gilt earrings and the reading of detective novels did little to enliven. Gloria presumed her life would be quite different–that glorious things would happen to her (as her name implied), that she would be illuminated within and without and her path would scorch like a comet's. This did not happen!

Kate Atkinson, One Good Turn (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 2006), p. 24.

Life began with reading

The most useful thing I brought out of my childhood was confidence in reading. Not long ago, I went on a weekend self-exploratory workshop, in the hope of getting a clue about how to live. One of the exercises we were given was to make a list of the ten most important events of our lives—the key moments that brought us from birth to wherever we are now. Number one was: "I was born," and you could put whatever you liked after that. Without even thinking about it my hand wrote, at number two: "I learnt to read." . . . Begin born was something done to me, but my own life began—I began for myself—when I first made out the meaning of a sentence.

-- Nuala O’Faolain, Are You Somebody? The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1999), p. 24.