They could take care of themselves.

He could mend them, he could learn to mend them.

Out of life he had captured something big and attempted to imprison it in the story.

It was the big thing out of life he had read to her, not sentence-structure and semicolons.

He wanted her to feel with him this big thing that was his, that he had seen with his own eyes, grappled with his own brain, and placed there on the page with his own hands in printed words.