Great Throughts Treasury

"Writing is an expression of the writer's own peculiar personality, could not help being so. Yet in reading great works one feels that the finished piece transcends the personal. All writers great and small must sometimes have felt that they have become part of what they wrote even more than it still remains a part of them."

"Yet regardless of where they come 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. ...I was ready for them, committed to all the reading I could give them..."

"Certainly friendship has proved a magnet to literature, an everlasting magnet. History, poetry, drama, letters have been drawn to the subject of friendship, not simply to celebrate it but to discover, perceive, learn from it the nature of ourselves, of humankind, the relationships we share in our world."

"Friendship and love ? know each other and avail themselves of each other. The solidest friendship is that of friends who love one another."

"Friendship has inherited its literary treasury; it lies in the language? And in that treasury?s further stories of pure gold are the works of the imagination, some old as time, some coined only yesterday."

"Friendship is inherently a magnet. As with its own drawing power, it locates and draws to the surface, spreads before our eyes poems, stories, essays, letters, in the widest variety."

"Did friendship between human beings come about in the first place along with ? or through ? the inspiration of language? It can be safe to say that when we learned to speak to, and listen to, rather than to strike or be struck by, our fellow human beings, we found something worth keeping alive, worth processing, for the rest of time. Might it possibly have been the other way round ? that the promptings of friendship guided us into learning to express ourselves, teaching ourselves, between us, a language to keep it by? Friendship might have been the first, as well as the best, teacher of communication. Which came first, friendship or the spoken word? They could rise from the same prompting: to draw together, not to pull away, not to threaten any longer."

"Friendship lives, as do we ourselves, in an ephemeral world. How much its life depends on the written word. The English language itself is friendship?s greatest treasure?. Do we not owefriendship, as we owe Shakespeare, to language?"