Michael Dirda Quotes
The world is a library of strange and wonderful books, and sometimes we just need to go prowling through the stacks.
Quotes to Explore
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The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.
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The fondest dream of the information age is to create an archive of all knowledge. You might call it the Alexandrian fantasy, after the great library founded by Ptolemy I in 286 BC.
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I've been quite fascinated by the relative insignificance of human existence, the shortness of life. We might as well be a letter in a word in a sentence on a page in a book in a library in a city in one country in this enormous universe! And that kind of fear and insignificance has kept me awake at night.
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All of my books are based in some way on my personal experiences, or the experiences of members of my family, or the stories kids would tell me in school.
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I keep working under the delusion that someday a library will ask for my manuscripts.
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I steer clear of books with ugly covers. And ones that are touted as 'sweeping,' 'tender' or 'universal.'
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Youku Tudou is a hybrid, like combining Netflix and YouTube. Like Netflix, with Youku, which launched in 2005, we syndicate a library of longform content and create original content. The Tudou model started with user-generated content but is increasingly becoming about partner-generated programming.
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Travel teaches as much as books.
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There's detailed information on how to assemble a nuclear weapon from parts. There's books about how to build a nuclear bomb.
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But when I was a little kid, I was always writing stories and illustrating little books that I would create.
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I still think it's really quite wonderful when I read a sentence of mine and it has that quality of lastingness.
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Books are still my favorite present.
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I didn't even enter a bookshop until I was 14 because I couldn't afford books until I got my first Saturday job, but by the time I was six or seven, I spent practically every Saturday down my local library reading as much as I could and getting out as many books as I could.
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The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading in order to write. A man will turn over half a library to make a book.
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In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody.
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He showed me his fantastic library first, and that helped me warm to him a little. A guy with a room like that in his house couldn’t be all bad.
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I do not carry such information in my mind since it is readily available in books. ...The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think.
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I don't have any great first job tales: I've never worked on a tramp steamer or in a coal mine or anything like that. I think the inspiration for my writing came largely from my father and the joy that life in books represented to me.
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I ask questions. I watch the world. And what I have discovered is that the parts of my fiction that people most tell me are 'unbelievable' are those that are most closely based on the real, those least diluted by my imagination.
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That's the worst of girls," said Edmund to Peter and the Dwarf. "They never can carry a map in their heads." "That's because our heads have something inside them," said Lucy.
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My head translates emotions into song. Songwriting is cathartic for me.
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God knows, I haven't always been successful.
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The poor man shuddered, overflowed with an angelic joy; he declared in his transport that this would last through life; he said to himself that he really had not suffered enough to deserve such radiant happiness, and he thanked God, in the depths of his soul, for having permitted that he, a miserable man, should be so loved by this innocent being.
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The world is a library of strange and wonderful books, and sometimes we just need to go prowling through the stacks.
