"I thought, maybe the difference between white folks and colored is just this matter of reading and writing. I made up my mind I would know my letters."

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In the reading and writing life, delight, for me, is where the mystery lies. Easy enough to figure out how scenes of violence or tragedy or titillation or grossness or even sentimentality can move us, but how the written word elicits delight - what Nabokov calls that shiver in the spine - is much harder to calculate and define.

— Alice McDermott