Spent much of Saturday............................

 

............................................rearranging mine:

a voice inside................

 

A library is a good place to soften solitude; a place where you feel part of a conversation that has gone on for hundreds and hundreds of years even when you're all alone.  The library is a whispering post.  You don't need to take a book off a shelf to know there is a voice inside that is waiting to speak to you, and behind that was someone who truly believed that if he or she spoke, someone would listen.

-Susan Orlean, The Library Book

This calls...............................

 

....................for another excursion to the Licking County Library.

A most impressive resume...............

 

But, he described himself as a graduate of the New York City Public Library.

wellness............................

 

image via

                A library is a hospital for the mind

-anonymous (quoted by Toffler)

Assuming the shelves.......................

 ...........are still loaded with books, this could be one of the greatest historic renovation, and/or urban renewal project, ever imaged.

The library is a dangerous place.................

 Long-time readers will remember that my library card is one of my most valued possessions.  Still, it important to know that said library is filled with traps, snares, sink-holes, and very long cul-de-sacs.  I fell into one of those places around Thanksgiving.   It was my intention, as the days got darker, to read some of the very important books that The-Wonder-That-Is-Amazon recently delivered to our home.  Instead, I picked up a C. J. Box book at the library.  Eight books later, I am not quite halfway through his Joe Pickett series.  Sometimes the mind just wants to spend time in very long cul-de-sacs.  The very important books will just have to wait.   I highly recommend him to you.

No limits.........................

via

Highly recommended...................

     "On the whole, I disliked school, sitting in class, receiving instruction;  information seemed to go in one ear and out the other.  I could not be passive—I had to be active, learn for myself, learn what I wanted, and in the way that suited me best.  I was not a good pupil, but I was a good learner, and in the Willesden library—and all the libraries that came later—I roamed the shelves and stacks, and had the freedom to select whatever I wanted, to follow paths that fascinated me, to become myself.  At the library I felt free—free to look at the thousands, tens of thousands, of books; free to roam and to enjoy the special atmosphere and the quiet companionship of other readers, all, like myself, on quests of their own."

Oliver Sacks, excerpted from the chapter "Libraries" in Everything In Its Place:  First Loves and Last Tales

All I want for Christmas...............

.........is to spend a day or three checking out his library, or his.

Library............................

....................................................................................porn.

via

Speaking of libraries.................

The wisdom of Austin Kleon..............

Cut and pasted from this blog post


Charles Schulz adds his two cents:

This is still one of my most valued possessions:

Library porn............................

...............................................it's enough to take your breath away.

Uh-oh...............................

While I'm a firm believer in the 12-Step movement, this is an addiction that may not be worth fighting.  Full story here.

No library is complete...............

........................................without a shelf for Nicholas Bate.

Making experiences...............Part 2

     The funny thing about a whole class of technology that enhances experience and personalization is that it puts great pressure on us to know who we are.  We will soon dwell smack in the middle of the Library of Everything, surrounded by the liquid presence of all existing works of humankind, just within reach of our fingertips, for free.  The great filters will be standing by, guiding us, ready to serve us our wishes.  "What do you want?" the filters ask.  "You can choose anything:  what do you choose?"  The filters have been watching us for years;  they anticipate what we will ask.  They can almost autocomplete it right now.  Thing is, we don't know what we want.  We don't know ourselves very well.

-Kevin Kelly,  The Inevitable

Brilliance.....................

“The closest you will ever come in this life to an orderly universe is a good library.” 
-Ashleigh Brilliant 

Sanctuary............................

"You take the action and the insight follows.  It was my mother who taught me how to wander through the racks of the Belvedere-Tiburon library, and wander through a  book, letting it take where it would.  She and my father took me to the library every week when I was little.  One of her best friends was the librarian.  They both taught me that if you insist on having a destination when you come into a library, you're shortchanging yourself.  They read to live, the way they also went to the beach, or ate delicious food.  Reading was like breathing fresh ocean air, eating tomatoes from old man Grbac's garden.  My parents, and librarians along the way, taught me about the space between words, about the margins, where so many juicy moments of life and spirit and friendship could be found.  In a library, you can find small miracles and truth, and you might find something that will make you laugh so hard that you will get shushed, in the friendliest way.  I have found sanctuary in libraries my whole life, and there is sanctuary there now, from the war, from the storms of our families and our own minds.  Libraries are like mountains or meadows or creeks:  sacred space.  So this afternoon, I'll walk to the library."

-Anne Lamott,  Plan B:  Further Thoughts on Faith

Yep................................

"That's why libraries are temples and the librarians are priests."
-Michael Wade, as culled from this exchange