"

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

"

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

"

But language is wine upon his lips

"

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

"

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

"

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.

"

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

"

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

"

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

"

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

"

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

"

When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me I am in darkness—I am nothing.

"

But for pain words are lacking. There should be cries, cracks, fissures, whiteness passing over chintz covers, interference with the sense of time, of...more

"

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

"

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