"On every book stall, in every magazine, you may find works telling people how to succeed. They are books showing men how to succeed in everything; they are written by men who cannot even succeed in writing books."
". . . gold and jewels and elephants and pepper. Especially pepper! Pepper may not mean much to us, but in that age it ranked with precious stones. Men risked the perils of the deep and fought and died for pepper. We find that hard to understand, perhaps, for the romance of pepper has now faded from the earth."
Ex Libris Kirkland (formerly known as "I Just Read . . .") is where I quote, at length, something I found interesting in my reading. The selected passages might be funny, or sad, or true, or false, or irritating, but they all bear thinking about - or at least writing down.
