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
-
The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
I keep working under the delusion that someday a library will ask for my manuscripts.
-
I steer clear of books with ugly covers. And ones that are touted as 'sweeping,' 'tender' or 'universal.'
-
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.
-
Books are an ancient and proven medium. Their physical form inspires passion.
-
As wonderful as being on stage is, family comes first.
-
Travel teaches as much as books.
-
There's detailed information on how to assemble a nuclear weapon from parts. There's books about how to build a nuclear bomb.
-
But when I was a little kid, I was always writing stories and illustrating little books that I would create.
-
I still think it's really quite wonderful when I read a sentence of mine and it has that quality of lastingness.
-
Books are still my favorite present.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
I have already seen death, and I know that death is supporting me in my cause of education. Death does not want to kill me.
-
Ever since I've been in Congress, various groups on the business side, those entities that are creating jobs out there, have felt that the Clean Air Act is really - that there are all sorts of presumptions in favor of the environmentalists.
-
I'm always afraid, because I do most of my stuff at home, where nobody bothers me, and I don't have to stroke somebody's ego or be careful about hurting someone's feelings. But I also want to know that I can still go into the world and be with other people and make music.
-
Point of view gets me. If I can feel like a character rather than a reader, I'll read that book.
-
Freedom of the press is to the machinery of the state what the safety valve is to the steam engine.
-
The world is a library of strange and wonderful books, and sometimes we just need to go prowling through the stacks.
