From seasons such as these
I like this:
"I had been allowed to keep my pink cretonne bag. I took it with me wherever I went, and it was soiled now with crumbs of old cake stuck under the cardboard base and stickings of honey on the inside. I had a copy of Shakespeare its pages thin like tissue paper and the print packed small and black and seeming wet like perpetually new footprints on the beach preserved against the obsessive shiftings of the tide. I seldom read my book yet it became more and more dilapidated physically, with pictures falling out and pages unleaving as if an unknown person were devoting time to studying it. This evidence of secret reading gave me a feeling of gratitude. It seemed as if the book understood how things were and agreed to be company for me and to breathe, even without my opening it, an overwhelming dignity of riches; but because, after all, the first passion of books is to be read, it had decided to read itself; which explained the gradual falling out of the pages."
-Janet Frame Faces in the Water
"I had been allowed to keep my pink cretonne bag. I took it with me wherever I went, and it was soiled now with crumbs of old cake stuck under the cardboard base and stickings of honey on the inside. I had a copy of Shakespeare its pages thin like tissue paper and the print packed small and black and seeming wet like perpetually new footprints on the beach preserved against the obsessive shiftings of the tide. I seldom read my book yet it became more and more dilapidated physically, with pictures falling out and pages unleaving as if an unknown person were devoting time to studying it. This evidence of secret reading gave me a feeling of gratitude. It seemed as if the book understood how things were and agreed to be company for me and to breathe, even without my opening it, an overwhelming dignity of riches; but because, after all, the first passion of books is to be read, it had decided to read itself; which explained the gradual falling out of the pages."
-Janet Frame Faces in the Water