"When I am reading a book, whether wise of silly," Swift once wrote, "it seemeth to me to be alive and talking to me." The books he owned that have survived show that he constantly talked back, filling the margins with comments and objections, as he did when he referred to King William's morals. Describing this period ten years later, he said of himself, "The author was then young, his invention at the height, and his reading fresh in his head. By the assistance of some thinking, and much conversation, he had endeavoured to strip himself of as many real prejudices as he could." That was his lifelong goal: to be faithful to firm principles, but only after thinking them through.
-Leo Damrosch, Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World
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