'Mercury'

"I was half-way through the belt of trees above the water-meadow when automatically my hand went to my pocket, encountering the sharp edge of the flap of the unsealed envelope.  With no further intention in my mind I pulled it out and looked at it.  There was no address (or direction, as Mrs Maudsley called it, why I could not imagine) on the envelope: there never was.  But the open flap disclosed some writing which, at the moment, was the wrong side up.
 Among the complexities of our school code was a very wholesome respect for the Eleventh Commandment.   But we also had a strong sense of justice, and if we were found out we did not expect to be let off.
…
The rules about reading other people's letters were fairly well defined.  If you left your letters lying about and somebody read them, then it was your fault, and you were not justified in retaliation,  If somebody rifled your desk or locker and read them then it was their fault, and you were justified in taking vengeance…
...I had often passed round notes at school.  If they were sealed I should not have dreamed of reading them; if they were open I often read them -- indeed, it was usually the intention of the sender that one should, for they were meant to raise a laugh.  Unsealed, one could read them, sealed one couldn't: it was as simple as that.  The same rule applied to post-cards: one read a post-card that was sent to someone else, but not a letter.
Marian's letter was unsealed and therefore I could read it.  So why hesitate?
….
But I would not take the letter out of the envelope: I would only read the words that were exposed, and three of them were the same, as I could see from upside down.

   'Darling, darling, darling,
        Same place, same time, this evening,
    But take care not to---'

The rest was hidden by the envelope."

The Go-Between  L.P.Hartley

The Chinese jar

"Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is living
Can only die.  Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence.  Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness."

From 'Burnt Norton',  Four Quartets   T.S. Eliot 

Who was Warrender Chase?

"God knows where I got Warrender Chase from; he was based on no one that I knew.

I know only that the night I started writing Warrender Chase I had been alone at a table in a restaurant near Kensington High Street Underground eating my supper.  I rarely ate out alone, but I must have found myself in funds that day.  I was going about my proper business, eating my supper while listening-in to the conversation at the next table.  One of them said, 'There we were all gathered in the living-room, waiting for him.'

It was all I needed.  That was the start of Warrender Chase, the first chapter.  All the rest sprang from that phrase.

But I invented for my Warrender a war record, a distinguished one, in Burma, and managed to make it really credible even although I filled in the war bit with a very few strokes, knowing, in fact, so little about the war in Burma.  It astonished me later to find how the readers found Warrender's war record so convincing and full when I had said so little -- one real war veteran of Burma wrote to say how realistic he found it -- but since then I've come to learn for myself how little one needs, in the art of writing, to convey the lot, and how a lot of words, on the other hand, can convey so little…..

All these years since, the critics have been asking whether Warrender was in love with his nephew.  How do I know?  Warrender Chase never existed, he is only some hundreds of words, some punctuation, sentences, paragraphs, marks on the page.  If I had conceived Warrender Chase's motives as a psychological study I would have said so.  But I didn't go in for motives, I never have."

Loitering with Intent   Muriel Spark

Dictionopolis

 " 'You see,' continued the minister, bowing thankfully to the duke, 'Dictionopolis is the place where all the words in the world come from.  They're grown right here in our orchards.'
'I didn't know they grew on trees,' said Milo timidly.
'Where did you think they grew?' shouted the earl irritably.
A small crowd began to gather to see the little boy who didn't know that letters grew on trees.
'I didn't know they grew at all,' admitted Milo even more timidly.  Several people shook their heads sadly.
'Well, money doesn't grow on trees, does it?' demanded the count.
'I've heard not', said Milo.
'Then something must. Why not words?' exclaimed the under-secretary triumphantly.  The crowd cheered his display of logic and went about their business.
'...people come from everywhere to buy the words they need or trade in the ones they haven't used.'

'Our job,' said the count, 'is to see that all the words sold are proper ones, for it wouldn't do to to sell someone a word that had no meaning or didn't exist at all.  For instance, if you bought a word like ghlbtsk, where would you use it?'

...'But we never choose which ones to use,' explained the earl, as they walked towards the market stalls,  'for as long as they mean what they mean to mean we don't care if they make sense or nonsense.' "

The Phantom Tollbooth  Norton Juster 1962