A "body full of sentences…"

from The English Patient, by Michael Ondaatje:

She entered the story knowing she would emerge from it feeling she had been immersed in the lives of others, in plots that stretched back twenty years, her body full of sentences and moments, as if reawakening from sleep with a heaviness caused by unremembered dreams…

"I still plod along with books…"

Today is the birthday of Harper Lee, which you may have heard if you tune into The Writer's Almanac on NPR or subscribe to the Almanac's daily email. We lift the following quote from there, with thanks.

I arrived in the first grade, literate, with a curious cultural assimilation of American history, romance, the Rover Boys, Rapunzel, and The Mobile Press. Early signs of genius? Far from it. Reading was an accomplishment I shared with several local contemporaries. Why this endemic precocity? Because in my hometown, a remote village in the early 1930s, youngsters had little to do but read. A movie? Not often — movies weren't for small children. A park for games? Not a hope. We're talking unpaved streets here, and the Depression. [...] Now, 75 years later in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods, and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books. Instant information is not for me. I prefer to search library stacks because when I work to learn something, I remember it. 

Harper Lee