From a clandestine network of friends passing to each other typed copies of their new work, the initiative developed over the years into a parallel publishing system. […] [I]n cities the inquisitive reader did not have much difficulty in obtaining access to what was in fact a banned literature. Samizdat was also an important source of new writing for the equally active and enterprising publishers of Czech (and some Slovak) books in exile.

Some apology, I feel, is due from one who has never been in Japan for venturing to write about netsukes.

Away from the immediate heat of our relationship—like when she's at school—I think to myself that I might even enjoy the wild energy her rilesome nature brings to my life if it weren't so evident that so much of the time the pain she causes me is anything but inadvertent.

How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable, / Seem to me all the uses of this world!