Does it afflict you to find your books wearing out? I mean literally
. . . . The mortality of all inanimate things is terrible to me, but that
of books most of all.
William Dean Howells (1837 - 1920) |
We all know that books burn - yet we have the greater knowledge that
books cannot be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. No man
and no force can abolish memory...In this war we know, books are weapons.
- Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882 - 1945) |
Contemporary books do not keep. The quality in them which makes for
their success is the first to go; they turn overnight.
- Cyril Connolly (1903 - 1974) |
Never lend books, for no one ever returns them: the only books I have
in my library are books that other folk have lent me.
- Anatole France (1844 - 1924) |
Of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness
of the flesh.
- Ecclesiastes, The Bible |
- A favorite inscription in old school books |
Robert Frost suggests that our destiny may lie in the act of historical
recovery - and that
the source of wholeness is in memory. History is a quest. The project
of shaping
ourselves as a people has only begun.