Every book is, in an intimate sense, a circular letter to the friends of him who writes it. They alone take his meaning; they find private messages, assurances of love, and expressions of gratitude, dropped at every corner. The public is but a generous patron who defrays the postage.

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) Scottish essayist, novelist, poet

Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes, Dedication to Sydney Colvin (1879)
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