Before the words slide into their slots, they are just discrete items, pointing everywhere and nowhere. - Stanley Fish

Literary interpretation, like virtue, is its own reward. I do it because I like the way I feel when I'm doing it.

We marvel at them; we read them aloud to our friends and spouses, even, occasionally, to passersby; we analyze them; we lament our inability to match them.

What we know of the world comes to us through words, or, to look at it from the other direction, when we write a sentence, we create a world, which is not the world, but the world as is appears within a dimension of assessment.