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Raised on a diet of broken biscuits

By day: academic library monkey. By night: person who makes things and reads when she should be studying.

I use this place as a trivial kind of commonplace book, to collect things which interest/edify/amuse or attract me, along with some journalish musings.

Posts tagged "quotes"

libraryland:unscrewthestars:mariasoyyo: (via precipice)

Ouch.

Old Uzbek had words for wanting to cry and not being able to, for being caused to sob by something, for loudly crying like thunder in the clouds, for crying in gasps, for weeping inwardly or secretly, for crying ceaselessly in a high voice, for crying in hiccups, and for crying while uttering the sound hay hay. Old Uzbek had special verbs for being unable to sleep, for speaking while feeding animals, for being a hypocrite, for gazing imploringly into a lover’s face, for dispersing a crowd.

STANFORD Magazine: January/February 2010 > Showcase > Author Elif Batuman

(excerpt from The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Love Them (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

I want to read this book… (via monkeyreader) (via thehermitage)

(via booklover)

I think being shy basically means being self-absorbed to the point that it makes it difficult to be around other people. For instance, if I’m hanging out with you, I can’t even tell whether I like you or not because I’m too worried about whether you like me.

David Foster Wallace (via awritersruminations)

(via ache)

The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.

Henri Nouwen

(Submitted by christinakim)

(via quote-book)

libraryland:

(via blueskiesandrainbows)

The library, and especially the public library, is one of the greatest of mankind’s creations, and surely a cornerstone of democratic society. When I was growing up in a small town in Ireland in the 1950s, the local county library was for me both a haven from the bleak realities of the time, and an opening on to a wider and richer reality … The imaginative and educational opportunities that the library offers are all the more necessary now, as the world faces into a period of economic shrinkage which may well be accompanied by an equal shrinkage in cultural life in general. The record of our civilisation rests in books, and free access to books is a vital part of the civilising process.

John Banville - The Guardian

A great many people from poor backgrounds have paid tribute to the place of public libraries in their unofficial education. For many people what the public libraries gave was as near as they had come until then to a revelation of the possible size and depth and variety of life, knowledge and understanding.

Richard Hoggart. A Measured Life: the times and places of an orphaned intellectual. Chatto & Windus, 1994. p. 173

Libraries raised me. I don’t believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don’t have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn’t go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.

Ray Bradbury (via mrgan)

This is apt. I had a lecture yesterday by Frank Webster about the (possibly bleak) future of public libraries. The lecturer used similar testimonials from Richard Hoggart and John Banville to illustrate the role which the public library has historically played in helping people to educate themselves outside of formal academia. As someone who has been in formal education for 18 of the last 26 years, I am in total awe of what people have achieved through self-motivated and self-directed study, and I am so glad that the library was there to fulfil that need.

Bill: My Sookie hid a corpse?
Eric: I don’t think you can be too sure about that possessive pronoun.
Bill: Where did you learn that term, Northman?
Eric: I took ‘English as a Second Language’ at a community college in the seventies.
Bill: She is mine.
[I wondered if my hands would move. They would. I raised both of them, making an unmistakable one fingered gesture. Eric laughed.]
Bill [shocked]: Sookie!
Eric: I think that Sookie is telling us she belongs to herself.

Fuck Yeah Eric Northman: Club Dead

I love this bit of backstory. And that he thinks Sookie giving them the finger(s) is hilarious. Oh Bill, so prissy.