Quotes from the World for Tuesday 04/24/MMXII

It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass. Yet regardless of where they came from, I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them—with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself. Still illiterate, I was ready for them, committed to all the reading I could give them.

Eudora Welty
Eudora Welty (b. 1909), U.S. fiction writer. One Writer’s Beginnings, ch. 1 (1984).