“Perhaps we women are more willing to break the ice. Two things that made this possible most often in many of our lives were intimate friendship and reading.”
Source: How Reading Changed My Life
“Democracy or reading, democracy of space: our public library tradition, wherever we live in the wide world, was incredibly hard-won for us by the generations before us and ought to be protected, not just for ourselves but in the name of every generation after us.”
Source: Public Library and Other Stories
“In a world where we spend ever more of our time staring at screens, blocking out even our most intimate and proximate human contacts, public institutions with open-door policies compel us to pay close attention to people nearby. After all, places like libraries are saturated with strangers, people whose bodies are different, whose styles are different, who make different sounds, speak different languages, give off different, sometimes noxious, smells. Spending time in public social infrastructures requires learning to deal with these differences in a civil manner.”
Source: Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life
“The accessible physical space of the library is not the only factor that makes it work well as social infrastructure. The institution's extensive programming, organized by a professional staff that upholds a principled commitment to openness and inclusivity, fosters social cohesion among clients who might otherwise keep to themselves.”
Source: Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life
“I exercised my mental muscles in the library, and lo and behold, I transformed myself from a casual reader into a focused one. So it was more than just free books, but also free space and a culture that reinforced settling down, deep reading, thinking, imagining, and exploring with my mind. I am no doubt a writer today because I had a place to go as a kid, where I knew stories were essential, and where everybody also reveled in the wonder within books.”
Source: Crossing Borders: Personal Essays
“Public libraries have succumbed to the same pressures that have overwhelmed the basic cultural functions of museums and universities, aims that should remain what they were, not because the old ways are always better but because in this case they were the right ones: the sustaining of standards, the preservation of quality, the conservation of literacy's history, the education of the heart, eye and mind. Now libraries devote far too much of their restricted space, and their limited budget, to public amusement. It is a fact of philistine life that amusement is where the money is.”
“Look at all the books in this place. Every one of them is inside you. And you're inside them."
"Sweetheart. It's a public library, not my private library. It needs people."
"They got out of the habit is all."
"The world has changed."
"No, everybody needs a story, Miss Perkins. That's something that never, ever changes.”
Source: Harry's Trees
“Deep reading is always about *connection*: connecting what we know to what we read, what we read to what we feel, what we feel to what we think, and how we think to how we live out our lives in a connected world.”
Source: Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World
“Their words also make it a lot easier for people to justify that shift -- to convince themselves that surfing the Web is a suitable, even superior, substitute for deep reading and other forms of calm and attentive thought. In arguing that books are archaic and dispensable, Federman and Shirky provide the intellectual cover that allows thoughtful people to slip comfortably in the permanent state of distractedness that defines the online life.”
Source: The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains
“...Montag paced the floor and came back and squatted down and read a page as many as ten times, aloud.”
Source: Fahrenheit 451