.gobbledygooks.

“What made me happy was seeing one person smile because I brought her a new story. One person to genuinely like your writing. Sometimes it’s enough. Sometimes it isn’t. But maybe we should all remember that we can only call ourselves writers if someone is willing to read what we’re writing.” The Portrait of a Writer: Essays; Cristian Mihai

“Your experience is not as limited as it may seem, for it involves more than events that have actually happened to you. You have watched incidents in which you did not participate. You have read, you have heard others tell about their lives. You have dreamed. All these experiences are stored in your memory.”

“History and literature were closely related during the 17th and 18th centuries. You should not attempt to study the literature written at that time without having a solid understanding of major political, economic, and cultural developments and their effects.”

“If I didn’t have to stay I’d leave, Jem, that damned lady says Atticus’s been teaching me to read and for him to stop it-”

“I mumbled that I was sorry and retired meditating upon my crime. I never deliberately learned to read, but somehow I had been wallowing illicitly in daily papers. In the long hours of church-was it then I learned? I could not remember not being able to read hymns. Now that I was compelled to think about it, reading was something that just came to me, as learning to fasten the seat of my union suit without looking around,mor achieving two bows from a snarl of shoelaces. I could not remember when the lines above Atticus’s moving finger separated into words, but I had stared at them all the evenings in my memory, listening to the news of the day, Bills To Be Enacted into Laws, the diaries of Lorenzo Dow- anything Atticus happened to be reading when I crawled into his lap every night. Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.”