Quotes by Librarians - Page 2

I was strong from losing them, maybe, but any goodness in me came from having them." (p. 124)
Dan Gemeinhart
All his flowers have been awaiting me on my arrival. I don't know whether to feel flattered or hunted.
Mary Ann Shaffer
Halfway to the house Stan stopped and turned to Jane. He put his hands on her shoulders and drew her toward him."I'm glad we're going steady," he whispered."So am I."In spite of the reassuring weight of his bracelet on her wrist, Jane suddenly felt shy. It seemed strange to be so close to Stan, to feel his crisp clean shirt against her cheek. She could not look up at him. Gently Stan lifted her face to his. "You're my girl," he whispered.-Fifteen
Beverly Cleary
‎What a blight that woman is. Do you happen to know why? I lean toward a malignant fairy at her christening.
Mary Ann Shaffer
I am always trying to 'preserve' things by getting other people to read what I have written, and feel what I felt.
Philip Larkin
I'm so well-rounded I'm almost spherical.
Brian Katcher
I had a moral tutor, but never saw him (the only words of his I remember are 'The three pleasures of life -drinking, smoking, and masturbation')
Philip Larkin
Caught in the center of a soundless fieldWhile hot inexplicable hours go byWhat trap is this? Where were its teeth concealed?You seem to ask.I make a sharp reply,Then clean my stick. I'm glad I can't explainJust in what jaws you were to suppurate:You may have thought things would come right againIf you could only keep quite still and wait.
Philip Larkin
Sovereignty, loyalty, and solitude.
Georges Bataille
My conduct with my friends is motivated: each being is, I believe, incapable on his own, of going to the end of being. If he tries, he is submerged within a "private being" which has meaning only for himself. Now there is no meaning for a lone individual: bing alone would of itself reject the "private being" if it saw it as such (if I wish my life to have meaning for me, it is necessary that it have meaning for others: no one would dare give to life a meaning which he alone would perceive, from which life in its entirety would escape, except within himself). At the extreme limit of the "possible", it is true, there is nonsense . . . but only of that which had a prior sense: this is fulguration, even "apotheosis" of nonsense. But I don't attain the extreme limit on my own and, in actual fact, I can't believe the extreme limit attained, for I never remain there. If I had to be the only one having attained it (assuming that I had . . .), it would be as thought it had not occurred. For if there subsisted a satisfaction, as small as I can imagine it to be, it would distance me as much from the extreme limit. I cannot for a moment cease to incite myself to attain the extreme limit, and cannot make a distinction between myself and those with whom I desire to communicate.~George Bataille, "Inner Experience" pg. 42
Georges Bataille
How hard it is, to be forced to the conclusion that people should be, nine tenths of the time, left alone! - When there is that in me that longs for absolute commitment. One of the poem-ideas I had was that one could respect only the people who knew that cups had to be washed up and put away after drinking, and knew that a Monday of work follows a Sunday in the water meadows, and that old age with its distorting-mirror memories follows youth and its raw pleasures, but that it's quite impossible to love such people, for what we want in love is release from our beliefs, not confirmation in them. That is where the 'courage of love' comes in - to have the courage to commit yourself to something you don't believe, because it is what - for the moment, anyway - thrills your by its audacity. (Some of the phrasing of this is odd, but it would make a good poem if it had any words...)
Philip Larkin
Oppressed peoples are always being asked to stretch a little more, to bridge the gap between blindness and humanity.
Audre Lorde
To achieve lasting literature, fictional or factual, a writer needs perceptive vision, absorptive capacity, and creative strength.
Lawrence Clark Powell
Never such innocence,Never before or since,As changed itself to pastWithout a word--the menLeaving the gardens tidy,The thousands of marriagesLasting a little while longer:Never such innocence again.
Philip Larkin
Uncontradicting solitudeSupports me on its giant palm;And like a sea-anemoneOr simple snail, there cautiouslyUnfolds, emerges, what I am.
Philip Larkin
Book collecting is a full-time occupation, and one wouldn't get far if one took time off for frivolities like reading.
A.N.L. Munby
Do you arrange your books alphabetically? (I hope not.)
Mary Ann Shaffer
Every race proves a new opportunity to educate myself about what it means to be a runner and what it means to run.
Jill Grunenwald
Dogs die. But dogs live, too. Right up until they die, they live. They live brave, beautiful lives. They protect their families. And love us. And make our lives a little brighter. And they don't waste time being afraid of tomorrow.
Dan Gemeinhart
It was only that she wanted him to be happy, resenting, however, his inability to be so with things as they were, and never acknowledging that though she did want him to be happy, it was only in her own way and by some plan of hers for him that she truly desired him to be so.
Nella Larsen
For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.
Audre Lorde
My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences.
Audre Lorde
The failure of academic feminists to recognize difference as a crucial strength is a failure to reach beyond the first patriarchal lesson. In our world, divide and conquer must become define and empower.
Audre Lorde
I realize that if I wait until I am no longer afraid to act write speak be I'll be sending messages on a ouija board cryptic complaints from the other side.
Audre Lorde
Nobody in Colonial America, to be sure, believed that society owed every child the ultimate in education, but intelligence, industry, and thrift combined with ambition got many a poor man's son into the colonial colleges.
Louis B. Wright
Boredom is a powerful reason, and the prospect of fun is a powerful draw - especially when you are young.
Mary Ann Shaffer
If she can't spell, why is she a librarian? Librarians should know how to spell.
Beverly Cleary
Libraries offer, for free, the wisdom of the ages--and sages--and, simply put, there's something for everyone inside.
Laura Bush
We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired.
Audre Lorde
I had a very wise mother. She always kept books that were my grade level in our house.
Beverly Cleary
Friends, show me a man who hates himself, and I'll show you a man who hates his neighbors more! He'd have to—you'd not grant anyone else something you can't have for yourself—no love, no kindness, no respect!
Mary Ann Shaffer
Laughing at the universe liberated my life. I escape its weight by laughing. I refuse any intellectual translations of this laughter, since my slavery would commence from that point on.
Georges Bataille
Women of today are still being called upon to stretch across the gap of male ignorance and to educate men as to our existence and our needs. This is an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the oppressed occupied with the master's concerns. Now we hear that is is the task of women of Color to educated white women - in the face of tremendous resistance - as to our existence, our differences, our relative roles in our joint survival. This is a diversion of energies and a tragic repetition of racist patriarchal thought.
Audre Lorde
There is a difference between information and knowledge, and the most important role of the library is not providing access to information; it is supporting, enhancing, and facilitating the transfer of knowledge - in other words, education.
Kathleen McCook
...our students should be playing Beethoven with research processes, but instead we are hearing Mary Had a Little Lamb.
William Badke
I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.
Audre Lorde
But it's hard to leave a place when you're tied to it by fear, when it's broken you with fear, when it's all you've ever known.
Claire Legrand
If you are alone, tell some stories to yourself. This is a different kind of pleasure and it has, indeed, its reward. I have tasted a little of everything, and I have truly never enjoyed anything more.
Charles Nodier
Education is learning what you didn't even know you didn't know.
Daniel Boorstin
The Fairy Queen has sent you to do brave deeds in this world. That High City that you see is in another world. Before you climb the path to it and hang your shield on its wall, go down into the valley and fight the dragon that you were sent to fight.
Margaret Hodges
You can't put off being young until you retire.
Philip Larkin
All my life I thought that the story was over when the hero and heroine were safely engaged -- after all, what's good enough for Jane Austen ought to be good enough for anyone. But it's a lie. The story is about to begin, and every day will be a new piece of the plot.
Mary Ann Shaffer
For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives here. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices.
Audre Lorde
Do you know what sentence of his (Wordsworth) I admire the most? It is "The bright day is done, and we are for the dark." I wish I'd known those words on the day I watched those German troops land, plane-load after plane-load of them--and come off ships down in the harbor! All I could think of was damn them, damn them, over and over. If I could have thought the words “the bright day is done and we are for the dark,” I’d have been consoled somehow and ready to go out and contend with circumstance—instead of my heart sinking to my shoes.
Mary Ann Shaffer
Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:The sun-comprehending glass,And beyond it, the deep blue air, that showsNothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.
Philip Larkin
I had no fear of the stream's perils, and I listened with the greatest contentment to the quiet slap of water on rocks, the running whisper of the current, and the taps and creaks and croaks that rose with the mist around me. Overhead swing the glittering stars, and the bright moon shone down and lit the curling ripples of the water. At no time in my life had I been in greater danger from the elements, and yet if I learned that heaven is such as that night was, I should deem it a joy worth the dying.
Clare B. Dunkle
When there is no connection at all between people, then anger is a way of bringing them closer together, of making contact. But when there is a great deal of connectedness that is problematic or threatening or unacknowledged, then anger is a way of keeping people separate, of putting distance between us.
Audre Lorde
I cannot hide my anger to spare you guilt, nor hurt feelings, nor answering anger; for to do so insults and trivializes all our efforts. Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one's own actions or lack of action. If it leads to change then it can be useful, since it is then no longer guilt but the beginning of knowledge.
Audre Lorde
That the public library is a part of the educational system should never be lost sight of in the work of establishing it, or in its management. To the great mass of the people it comes as their first and only educational opportunity.
John Cotton Dana
I'm terrified of the thought of time passing (or whatever is meant by that phrase) whether I 'do' anything or not. In a way I may believe, deep down, that doing nothing acts as a brake on 'time's - it doesn't of course. It merely adds the torment of having done nothing, when the time comes when it really doesn't matter if you've done anything or not.
Philip Larkin
Writing is a solitary occupation. Family friends and society are the natural enemies of a writer. He must be alone uninterrupted and slightly savage if he is to sustain and complete an undertaking.
Laurence Clark Powell
I cried to think of how lucky we both were to have found each other, since it was clear that we were the only ones in the world who could understand what we understood in the instantaneous manner in which we understood it.
Audre Lorde
Children should learn that reading is pleasure, not just something that teachers make you do in school.
Beverly Cleary
Dewey sent him, I thought, when I saw those eyes.
Vicki Myron
May I have a few friends and many books - both true.
Arthur Ernest Cowley
The emotional element which gives an obsessive value to communal existence is death.
Georges Bataille
Unless their use by readers bring them to life, books are indeed dead things.
Lawrence Clark Powell
I believe that truth has only one face: that of a violent contradiction.
Georges Bataille
There is bad in all good authors: what a pity the converse isn't true!
Philip Larkin
America's libraries are the fruits of a great democracy. They exist because we believe that memory and truth are important. They exists because we believe that information an knowledge are not the exclusive domain of a certain type or class of person but rather the province of all who seek to learn. A democratic society holds these institutions in high regard.
Robert S Martin