If You Want To Feel At Home,

What Is A Sense Of Humor? Surely Not The Ability To Understand A Joke. It Comes Rather From A Residing Feeling Of One's Own Absurdity. It Is The Ability To Understand A Joke, And That The Joke Is On Oneself.

[books] Will Visit You At Your Convenience, Whether You Are Lonesome Or Not, On Rainy Days Or Fair. They Propose Themselves As Either Transient Acquaintances Or Permanent Friends. They Will Stay As Long As You Like, Departing Or Returning As You Wish. Their Friendship Entails No Obligation. Best Of All, And Not Always True Of Our Merely Human Friends, They Have Cleopatra's Infinite Variety.

Socrates Called Himself A Midwife Of Ideas. A Great Book Is Often Such A Midwife, Delivering To Full Existence What Has Been Coiled Like An Embryo In The Dark, Silent Depths Of The Brain.

The Kind Of Poetry To Avoid In The Pretty-pretty Kind That Pleased Our Grandmothers, The Kind That Longfellow And Tennyson, Good Poets At Their Best, Wrote At Their Worst.

To Read In Bed Is To Draw Around Us Invisible, Noiseless Curtains. Then At Last We Are In A Room Of Our Own And Are Ready To Burrow Back, Back To That Private Life Of The Imagination We All Led As A Child And To Whose Secret Satisfactions So Many Of Us Have Mislaid The Key.