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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There are many reluctant young readers who haven't yet found books that make them laugh.
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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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May books spread the world over!
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Books are an ancient and proven medium. Their physical form inspires passion.
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As wonderful as being on stage is, family comes first.
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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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Maybe they're not 'books,' but 'Acme Novelty Library' and 'Eightball' are two comics I can't get enough of.
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People always say 'Etta, you know what your problem is? You're neither fish nor fowl. There is no place to rack you.' When I would go in a record shop, you might find one or two records by me in different stacks.
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The kid that showed up (Maddox), that's incredible. I mean, she wasn't even on our radar. It's kind of interesting with us. Probably the best thing that happened to Temple was that their point guard went down, because then our brains went to sleep and we no longer focused on the guards. It was confusion, at the very least.
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Likewise grace and glory are referred to the same genus, since grace is nothing other than a certain first beginning of glory in us.
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When I meet a historian who cannot think that there have been great men, great men moreover in politics, I feel myself in the presence of a bad historian, and there are times when I incline to judge all historians by their opinion of Winston Churchill -- whether they can see that, no matter how much better the details, often damaging, of man and career become known, he still remains quite simply, a great man.
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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.
