He picked up the lemons that Fate had sent him and started a lemonade-stand.

I own a book,' he thought, delighted (Paolini 291).

"What is the greatest reward a writer can have? Isn't it that day when someone rushes up to you, his face bursting with honesty, his eyes afire with admiration and cries, "That new story of yours was fine, really wonderful!

He began to write his thoughts and observations concerning the day's events [...] It helped him better understand everything he had seen and done over the course of the day.

He was enthusiastic about everything, but when she came in with the pie he grew positively lyrical.

"While browsing in a second-hand bookshop one day, George Bernard Shaw was amused to find a copy of one of his own works which he himself had inscribed for a friend: "To — — , with esteem, George Bernard Shaw."

He immediately purchased the book and returned it to the friend with a second inscription: "With renewed esteem, George Bernard Shaw.

…Jo valued the letter more than the money, because it was encouraging, and after years of effort it was so pleasant to find that she had learned to do something…

Many a happy hour she had spent planning for something nice for him. Something fine and rare and sterling — something

He went to the church, and walked about the streets, and watched the people hurrying to and for, and patted the children on the head, and questioned beggars, and looked down into the kitchens of homes, and up to the windows, and found that everything could yield him pleasure. He had never dreamed of any walk, that anything, could give him so much happiness. (p. 119)

He wrote down everything he saw and heard, and most of his thoghts, sometimes in verse, sometimes in prose. It could take him many hours to write in his diary a survey of one full day: everything was an experience, any noteworthy observation which some nameless person might make was a new vista, any insignificant piece of information was a new sunrise, any ordinary poem he read for the first time was the beginning of a new epoch like a flight around the globe; the world was multiform, magnificent and opulent, and he loved it.

Hemingway was eager as a child, and I smiled remembering the first time I had seen him, at a Writers' Congress in New York. He was making his maiden public speech, and when it didn't read right, he got mad at it, repeating the sentences he had fumbled, with exceptional vehemence. Now he was like a big kid, and you liked him. He asked questions like a kid: "What then? What happened then? And what did you do? And what did he say? And then what did you do?" Matthews said nothing, but he took notes on a folded sheet of paper. "What's your name?" said Hemingway; I told him. "Oh," he said, "I'm awful glad to see you; I've read your stuff." I knew he was glad to see me; it made me feel good, and I felt sorry about the times I had lambasted him in print; I hoped he had forgotten them, or never read them. "Here," he said, reading in his pocket. "I've got more." He handed me a full pack of Lucky Strikes.

"He came to be very glad that he had known her, and that she had had a hand in breaking him in to life. He has known pretty women and clever ones since then, — but never one like her, as she was in her best days. Her eyes, when they laughed for a moment into one`s own, seemed to promise a wild delight that he has not found in life. "I know where it is," they seemed to say, "I could show you!

The first time it was my turn to do the shopping, I overindulged my growing taste for exotic food with a bagful of goodies like smoked elk’s liver and chocolate-covered ants and mackerel-and-prune soup and curried walrus testicles. I’d sort of forgotten about the milk and the bread and the eggs. I was never allowed to shop again.

She sent him scented letters, And he received them with a strange delight. Just like his wife But how she was before the tears, And how she was before the years flew by, And how she was when she was beautiful.