Kenneth Grahame

Kenneth Grahame (1859-1932) spent his working life at the Bank of England and wrote The Wind in the Willows (1908) out of bedtime stories told to his son. It was rejected by his publisher and dismissed by reviewers before becoming a classic. The book is two things at once — a comic novel about a reckless toad and a quiet argument for the riverbank life — and the lines most quoted from it belong to the second. Quotes are cited by chapter.