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My head is a hive of words that won't settle.

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Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.

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But language is wine upon his lips

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She liked getting hold of some book... and keeping it to herself, and gnawing its contents in privacy, and pondering the meaning without sharing her t...more

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He is forced to coin words himself, and, taking his pain in one hand, and a lump of pure sound in the other (as perhaps the people of Babel did in the...more

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The taste for books was an early one. As a child he was sometimes found at midnight by a page still reading. They took his taper away, and he bred glo...more

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The flower bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and went. And what the poets said in rhyme, the young translated into practice.

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But Sasha was from Russia, where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden and sentences are often left unfinished from doubt as how to best end t...more

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Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticate...more

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Perhaps then one reason why we have no great poet, novelist or critic writing today is that we refuse to allow words their liberty. We pin them down t...more

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To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon w...more

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The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to...more

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I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on pavement.

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Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and falls again. I am a...more

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And there he would lie all day long on the lawn brooding presumably over his poetry, till he reminded one of a cat watching birds, when he had found t...more