Ala Library Quotes

Libraries are the thin red line between civilization and barbarism." [Libraries on the Front Lines, ALA interview 2011]

You are a terrible liar. You do want this. Just as badly as I do.” My mouth opened, but no words came out. “You want this as badly as you want to go to ALA this winter.” Now my jaw was on the floor. “You don’t even know what ALA is!” “American Library Association midwinter event,” he said, grinning proudly. “Saw you obsessing over it on your blog before you got sick. I’m pretty sure you said you’d give up your firstborn child to go.” Yeah, I kind of did say that. Daemon eyes flashed. “Anyway, back to the whole you wanting me part.” I shook my head, dumbfounded. “You do want me.” Taking a deep breath, I struggled with my temper… and my amusement. “You are way too confident.” “I’m confident enough to wager a bet.” “You can’t be serious.” He grinned. “I bet that by New Year’s Day, you will have admitted that you’re madly, deeply, and irrevocably—” “Wow. Want to throw another adverb out there?” My cheeks were burning. “How about irresistibly?” I rolled my eyes and muttered, “I’m surprised you know what an adverb is.” “Stop distracting me, Kitten. Back to my bet—by New Year’s Day, you’ll have admitted that you’re madly, deeply, irrevocably, and irresistibly in love with me.” Stunned, I choked on my laugh. “And that you dream about me.” He released my arm and folded his, cocking an eyebrow. “I bet you’ll even admit that. Probably even show me your notebook with my name circled in hearts—” “Oh, for the love of God…” Daemon winked. “It’s on.

Dearest creature in creation, Study English pronunciation. I will teach you in my verse Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse. I will keep you, Suzy, busy, Make your head with heat grow dizzy. Tear in eye, your dress will tear. So shall I! Oh hear my prayer. Just compare heart, beard, and heard, Dies and diet, lord and word, Sword and sward, retain and Britain. (Mind the latter, how it’s written.) Now I surely will not plague you With such words as plaque and ague. But be careful how you speak: Say break and steak, but bleak and streak; Cloven, oven, how and low, Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe. Hear me say, devoid of trickery, Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore, Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles, Exiles, similes, and reviles; Scholar, vicar, and cigar, Solar, mica, war and far; One, anemone, Balmoral, Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel; Gertrude, German, wind and mind, Scene, Melpomene, mankind. Billet does not rhyme with ballet, Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet. Blood and flood are not like food, Nor is mould like should and would. Viscous, viscount, load and broad, Toward, to forward, to reward. And your pronunciation’s OK When you correctly say croquet, Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve, Friend and fiend, alive and live. Ivy, privy, famous; clamour And enamour rhyme with hammer. River, rival, tomb, bomb, comb, Doll and roll and some and home. Stranger does not rhyme with anger, Neither does devour with clangour. Souls but foul, haunt but aunt, Font, front, wont, want, grand, and grant, Shoes, goes, does. Now first say finger, And then singer, ginger, linger, Real, zeal, mauve, gauze, gouge and gauge, Marriage, foliage, mirage, and age. Query does not rhyme with very, Nor does fury sound like bury. Dost, lost, post and doth, cloth, loth. Job, nob, bosom, transom, oath. Though the differences seem little, We say actual but victual. Refer does not rhyme with deafer. Foeffer does, and zephyr, heifer. Mint, pint, senate and sedate; Dull, bull, and George ate late. Scenic, Arabic, Pacific, Science, conscience, scientific. Liberty, library, heave and heaven, Rachel, ache, moustache, eleven. We say hallowed, but allowed, People, leopard, towed, but vowed. Mark the differences, moreover, Between mover, cover, clover; Leeches, breeches, wise, precise, Chalice, but police and lice; Camel, constable, unstable, Principle, disciple, label. Petal, panel, and canal, Wait, surprise, plait, promise, pal. Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair, Senator, spectator, mayor. Tour, but our and succour, four. Gas, alas, and Arkansas. Sea, idea, Korea, area, Psalm, Maria, but malaria. Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean. Doctrine, turpentine, marine. Compare alien with Italian, Dandelion and battalion. Sally with ally, yea, ye, Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, and key. Say aver, but ever, fever, Neither, leisure, skein, deceiver. Heron, granary, canary. Crevice and device and aerie. Face, but preface, not efface. Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass. Large, but target, gin, give, verging, Ought, out, joust and scour, scourging. Ear, but earn and wear and tear Do not rhyme with here but ere. Seven is right, but so is even, Hyphen, roughen, nephew Stephen, Monkey, donkey, Turk and jerk, Ask, grasp, wasp, and cork and work. Pronunciation (think of Psyche!) Is a paling stout and spikey? Won’t it make you lose your wits, Writing groats and saying grits? It’s a dark abyss or tunnel: Strewn with stones, stowed, solace, gunwale, Islington and Isle of Wight, Housewife, verdict and indict. Finally, which rhymes with enough, Though, through, plough, or dough, or cough? Hiccough has the sound of cup. My advice is to give up!!!

One of the loudest voices to address this issue belonged to the American Library Association (ALA). Librarians felt duty-bound to try to stop Hitler from succeeding in his war of ideas against the United States. They had no intention of purging their shelves or watching their books burn, and they were not going to wait until war was declared to take action.

The library is not a shrine for the worship of books. It is not a temple where literary incense must be burned or where one's devotion to the bound book is expressed in ritual. A library, to modify the famous metaphor of Socrates, should be the delivery room for the birth of ideas - a place where history comes to life. — Cited in ALA Bulletin, Oct. 1954, p.475

A library is more than a brick and mortar building filled with delicious books. It is also a community of people who live to invest in our youth, who read for knowledge and fun, and who are ready to include anyone who walks through the door.

Alas,” he says, and I worry I’m going to start developing some kind of Masterpiece Theatre library of sexual fantasies. Alas, alas, alas. I’m thinking about the word cravats when he finishes his sentence. “I am not in an area known for its hands-craftsmanship.

What is written can be erased, alas.

The girl smiled, and the Ala knew she would not be returning to the Nest alone that day. She had gone to the library in search of hope, but what she'd found instead was a child. It would take her many years to realize that the two were not so different after all.

In 2023, as I write this, librarians in America are on the front lines of the culture war. Censorship is at an all-time high. According to the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, “a record 2,571 unique titles were targeted for censorship in 2022, a 38% increase from the 1,858 unique titles targeted for censorship in 2021.” This is the highest number of attempted book bans since ALA began compiling data about censorship in libraries more than twenty years ago.

Owing to the shape of a bell curve, the education system is geared to the mean. Unfortunately, that kind of education is virtually calculated to bore and alienate gifted minds. But instead of making exceptions where it would do the most good, the educational bureaucracy often prefers not to be bothered. In my case, for example, much of the schooling to which I was subjected was probably worse than nothing. It consisted not of real education, but of repetition and oppressive socialization (entirely superfluous given the dose of oppression I was getting away from school). Had I been left alone, preferably with access to a good library and a minimal amount of high-quality instruction, I would at least have been free to learn without useless distractions and gratuitous indoctrination. But alas, no such luck. Let’s try to break the problem down a bit. The education system […] is committed to a warm and fuzzy but scientifically counterfactual form of egalitarianism which attributes all intellectual differences to environmental factors rather than biology, implying that the so-called 'gifted' are just pampered brats who, unless their parents can afford private schooling, should atone for their undeserved good fortune by staying behind and enriching the classroom environments of less privileged students. This approach may appear admirable, but its effects on our educational and intellectual standards, and all that depends on them, have already proven to be overwhelmingly negative. This clearly betrays an ulterior motive, suggesting that it has more to do with social engineering than education. There is an obvious difference between saying that poor students have all of the human dignity and basic rights of better students, and saying that there are no inherent educationally and socially relevant differences among students. The first statement makes sense, while the second does not. The gifted population accounts for a very large part of the world’s intellectual resources. As such, they can obviously be put to better use than smoothing the ruffled feathers of average or below-average students and their parents by decorating classroom environments which prevent the gifted from learning at their natural pace. The higher we go on the scale of intellectual brilliance – and we’re not necessarily talking just about IQ – the less support is offered by the education system, yet the more likely are conceptual syntheses and grand intellectual achievements of the kind seldom produced by any group of markedly less intelligent people. In some cases, the education system is discouraging or blocking such achievements, and thus cheating humanity of their benefits.

Alas! a woman that attempts the pen, Such a presumptuous creature is esteemed, The fault can by no virtue be redeemed. They tell us we mistake our sex and way; Good breeding, fashion, dancing, dressing, play, Are the accomplishments we should desire; To write, or read, or think, or to enquire, Would cloud our beauty, and exhaust our time, And interrupt the conquests of our prime, Whilst the dull manage of a servile house Is held by some our utmost art and use.

My grandest boyhood ambition was to be a professor of history at Notre Dame. Although what I do now is just a different way of working with history, I suppose.”) He told me about his blind-in-one-eye canary rescued from a Woolworth’s who woke him singing every morning of his boyhood; the bout of rheumatic fever that kept him in bed for six months; and the queer little antique neighborhood library with frescoed ceilings (“torn down now, alas”) where he’d gone to get away from his house. About Mrs. De Peyster, the lonely old heiress he’d visited after school, a former Belle of Albany and local historian who clucked over Hobie and fed him Dundee cake ordered from England in tins, who was happy to stand for hours explaining to Hobie every single item in her china cabinet and who had owned, among other things, the mahogany sofa—rumored to have belonged to General Herkimer—that got him interested in furniture in the first place.

Whether is was Uncle Monty's library of reptile books, or Aunt Josephine's library of grammar books, or Justice Strauss's library of law books, or, best of all their parents' library of all kinds of books - all burn up now, alas - libraries always made them feel a little better. Just knowing that they could read made the Baudelaire orphans feel as if their wretched lives could be a little brighter.

I haunted and interrogated the past even as it interrogated me. London, Skinner's Lane, Brook Street, the Sudan - how had we passed all that time? Why did we not burn up every moment of it, as we would if we could have it all again? The journey back to England surfaced in dreams and occupied my days, the train to Wadi Halfa panting across the desert, reading old newspapers in the white, shuttered carriages while Taha, alas, was obliged to travel with the guard; and the stops, which had no names, but only a number, painted on a little shelter beside the track; and the steamer to the first Cateract and the visionary beauty of Aswan.

I was delighted to hear that a number of people returned to see Orphée (as much as five or six times), to the amazement of the managements. This is significant, for the cinema is usually regarded as a place where one drops in for a little entertainment as one would for a glass of beer. This is why film societies, those Courts of Appeal, have so important a part to play, and why they deserve all the support we can give them. This is why I accepted nomination as President of the fédération des Cinéclubs. But, alas, even film societies are sometimes unable to retrieve old films, which the industrial squall sweeps away in order to clear a space for new ones. We had imagined that great actresses like Greta Garbo would be granted the privilege which was denied to a Rachel or a Sarah Bernhardt. But we were wrong. Today it is impossible to show Garbo in The lady of the Camelias for instance, to the young people who could not see the film when it came out, for all the copies have been meticulously destroyed. The lady of the Camelias is to be remade with new stars and new methods, using all the latest technical inventions, colour, three dimensions, and what not. It is a real disaster. Mrs B., the head of the new York Film Library, finds herself confronted with the same difficulties as Langlois of the Cinémathèque française whenever she endeavours to save a film from oblivion. She finds that she cannot obtain a single copy. Chaplin alone escapes that terrible destruction, because he is his own firm and consequently would not fall victim to the perpetual clearing. It is none the less true that fabulous sums are demanded for the showing of any one of his films, and if his very early films are still available it is because the present destructive legislation had not come into force when they were made. This is why René Clair demands the passing of a law of copyright deposit.

But I didn't mind. I loved that everything was cataloged and ready to go and that I was technically now living and sleeping in a library.

Socrates: Then alas, Alcibiades, what a condition you suffer from! I hesitate to name it, but, since we two are alone, it must be said. You are wedded to stupidity, best of men, of the most extreme sort, as the argument accuses you and you accuse yourself. So this is why you are leaping into the affairs of the city before you have been educated. You are not the only one to suffer from this; most of those who manage the affairs of the city are the same way, except [C] a few—perhaps including your guardian, Pericles.

The American Library Association (ALA) lists eleven core values of librarianship: access, confidentiality/privacy, democracy, diversity, education and lifelong learning, intellectual freedom, preservation, the public good, professionalism, service, and social responsibility.

It depends what you mean by ‘really good’,” said Mrs. Millard thoughtfully. “If you mean is it a work of art which will enrol you in the annals of fame it isn’t good at all. Alas, my poor Jane, you will never see your sculptured bust displayed on a marble column in the British Museum — or wherever it is that they display sculptured busts of the famous — but, unless I am very much mistaken, you will see a great many copies of The Mulberry Coach on the shelves of libraries and the counters of bookstalls all over the country — and probably in America as well if you have the temerity to cross the Atlantic Ocean. You see, my dear Jane, The Mulberry Coach provides an escape from the drabness of the modern world.” She

Some are born to greatness; some achieve greatness; some have greatness thrust upon them.' It is in this way that the librarian has become a censor of literature... books that distinctly commend what is wrong, that teach how to sin and how pleasant sin is, sometimes with and sometimes without the added sauce of impropriety, are increasingly popular, tempting to the author to imitate them, the publishers to produce, the bookseller to exploit. Thank heaven they do not tempt the librarian.

At the time, the library's fire prevention consisted of smoke detectors and handheld fire extinguishers. There were no sprinklers. The American Library Association, known informally as the ALA, always advised against sprinklers, because water damage was even worse for books than fire damage.

Why are you here? I’ve never seen anybody else in the library at night before.” “Sometimes,” the Ala said, “when I’m feeling sad, I like to be around all these books. They’re very good at making you forget your troubles. It’s like having a million friends, wrapped in paper and scrawled in ink.