then that wonderful phrase , melodious and mellifluous , the phrase to beat all others and the first one that i created and therefore loved so passionately ( and this is a novel about the greatest of all earthly loves ) more than i loved life itself , held sway over me for a long time around my nineteenth birthday and it survives entombed beginning about two point three centimeters away from the red line of the margin , worked in my crabbed scrawl in black ink across the top of a sheet of green graph paper .