A Time Of Gifts in the Bookshop

A Time Of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor

"I found my mind wandering at games; loved boxing and was good at it; and in summer, having chosen rowing instead of cricket, lay peacefully by the Stour, well upstream of the rhythmic creaking and the exhortation, reading Lily Christine and Gibbon and gossiping with kindred lotus-eaters under the willow-branches." - Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time of Gifts

 

Angle of Repose in the Bookshop

"How well I know what I mean to do

When the long dark Autumn evenings come,

And where, my soul, is thy pleasant hue?

With the music of all thy voices, dumb

In life’s November too!

I shall be found by the fire, suppose,

O’er a great wise book as beseemeth age,

While the shutters flap as the cross-wind blows,

And I turn the page, and I turn the page,

Not verse now, only prose!" - Robert Browning