A boy is coming down a flight of stairs.
The passage is narrow and twists back on itself.
He takes each step slowly, sliding himself along the wall, his boots meeting each tread with a thud. - P5
Nothing. Just the creaking of beams expanding gently in the sun, the sigh of air passing under doors, between rooms, the swish of linen drapes, the crack of the fire, the indefinable noise of a house at rest, empty. - P6
Hamnet’s mind is quick: he has no trouble understanding the schoolmasters’ lessons. He can grasp the logic and sense of what he is being told, and he can memorise readily. Recalling verbs and grammar and tenses and rhetoric and numbers and calculations comes to him with an ease that can, on occasion, attract the envy of other boys. But his is a mind also easily distracted. - P7
The noise of a bird in the sky can make him cease speaking, mid-utterance, as if the very heavens have struck him deaf and dumb at a stroke. - P8
Every life has its kernel, its hub, its epicentre, from which everything flows out, to which everything returns. - P9
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