For example, a lot of the ideas in this book started out as tweets, which then became blog posts, which then became book chapters. Small things, over time, can get big.

A book, I was taught long ago in English class, is a living and breathing document that grows richer with each new reading.

The academic world was marching toward ever more specialized knowledge, expressed in ever more dense jargon.

When she came to write her story, she would wonder when the books and the words started to mean not just something, but everything.

A book… it’s a world all on its own too. A world made of words, where you live for a while.

A book is more than a verbal structure or series of verbal structures; it is the dialogue it establishes with its reader and the intonation it imposes upon his voice and the changing and durable images it leaves in his memory. A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships.

"What a big book, captain, might be made with all that is known!"
"And what a much bigger book still with all that is not known!"

Books are often far more than just books.

Words and a book and a belief that the world is words...

I suppose that it was inevitable that my word-base broadened. I could now for the first time pick up a book and read and now begin to understand what the book was saying. Anyone who has read a great deal can imagine the new world that opened. Let me tell you something: from then until I left that prison, in every free moment I had, if I was not reading in the library, I was reading in my bunk. You couldn’t have gotten me out of my books with a wedge...Months passed without my even thinking about being imprisoned. In fact, up to then, I never had been so truly free in my life.

Consider, for example, language. It is a complex structure that is continually changing and developing. It has a well-defined order, yet no central body planned it. No one decided what words should be admitted into the language, what the rules of grammar should be, which words should be adjectives, which nouns. The French Academy does try to control changes in the French language, but that was a late development. It was established long after French was already a highly structured language and it mainly serves to put the seal of approval on changes over which it has no control. There have been few similar bodies for other languages. How did language develop? In much the same way as an economic order develops through the market — out of the voluntary interaction of individuals, in this case seeking to trade ideas or information or gossip rather than goods and services with one another.

It is a world of words to the end of it, / In which nothing solid is its solid self.

Words create worlds.

Words, words, words.