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21 " But the central branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library was still a place of wonders to Tess, even if the book budget had been slashed and the hours cut. Her parents had made a lot of mistakes, a fact Tess compulsively shared on first dates, but she gave them credit for doing one thing right: Starting when she was eight, they gave her a library card and dropped her off at the downtown Pratt every Saturday while they shopped. Twenty-one years later, Tess still entered through the children's entrance on the side, pausing to toss a penny in the algae-coated fish pond, then climbing the stairs to the main hall. If she could be married here, she would. "
― Laura Lippman , Baltimore Blues (Tess Monaghan #1)
22 " The creative writer is compulsively concrete . . . . His fictional house should be haunted by ideas, not inhabited by them; they should flit past the windows after dark, not fill the rooms. The moment anyone tries to make poems or stories of ideas alone he is at the edge of absurdity; he can only harangue, never interest and persuade, because ideas in their conceptual state are simply not dramatic. They have to be put into the form of people and actions . . . "
― Wallace Stegner , On Teaching and Writing Fiction
23 " It is only when we no longer compulsively need someone that we can have a real relationship with them. "