Orleans Book Quotes

The library is a gathering pool of narratives and of the people who come to find them. It is where we can glimpse immortality; in the library, we can live forever.

All the things that are wrong in the world seem conquered by a library’s simple unspoken promise: Here I am, please tell me your story; here is my story, please listen.

In Senegal, the polite expression for saying someone died is to say his or her library has burned. When I first heard the phrase, I didn’t understand it, but over time I came to realize it was perfect. Our minds and souls contain volumes inscribed by our experiences and emotions; each individual’s consciousness is a collection of memories we’ve cataloged and stored inside us, a private library of a life lived.

Destroying a culture’s books is sentencing it to something worse than death: It is sentencing it to seem as if it never lived.

Writing a book, just like building a library, is an act of sheer defiance. It is a declaration that you believe in the persistence of memory.

I have come to believe that books have souls—why else would I be so reluctant to throw one away?

It wasn't that time stopped in the library. It was as if it were captured, collected here, and in all libraries -- and not only my time, my life, but all human time as well. In the library, time is dammed up--not just stopped but saved.

Destroying a library is a kind of terrorism. People think of libraries as the safest and most open places in society. Setting them on fire is like announcing that nothing, and nowhere, is safe.

librarians should “read as a drunkard drinks or as a bird sings or a cat sleeps or a dog responds to an invitation to go walking, not from conscience or training, but because they’d rather do it than anything else in the world.

The reading of the book was a journey. There was no need for souvenirs.

In times of trouble, libraries are sanctuaries.

The publicness of the public library is an increasingly rare commodity. It becomes harder all the time to think of places that welcome everyone and don’t charge any money for that warm embrace.

Every problem that society has, the library has, too, because the boundary between society and the library is porous; nothing good is kept out of the library, and nothing bad.

Books are a sort of cultural DNA, the code for who, as a society, we are, and what we know. All the wonders and failures, all the champions and villains, all the legends and ideas and revelations of a culture last forever in its books.

There where one burns books, one in the end burns men.

Libraries may embody our notion of permanence, but their patrons are always in flux. In truth, a library is as much a portal as it is a place—it is a transit point, a passage.

books are the last things that any human being can afford to do without.

Our minds and souls contain volumes inscribed by our experiences and emotions; each individual’s consciousness is a collection of memories we’ve cataloged and stored inside us, a private library of a life lived.

Public libraries in the United States outnumber McDonald’s; they outnumber retail bookstores two to one.

The library is a whispering post. You don't need to take a book off a shelf to know there is a voice inside that is waiting to speak to you, and behind that was someone who truly believed that if he or she spoke, someone would listen. It was that affirmation that always amazed me. Even the oddest, most peculiar book was written with that kind of courage -- the writer's belief that someone would find his or her book important to read. I was struck by how precious and foolish and brave that belief is, and how necessary, and how full of hope it is to collect these books and manuscripts and preserve them. It declares that stories matter, and so does every effort to create something that connects us to one another, and to our past, and to what is still to come.

People think that libraries are quiet, but they really aren’t. They rumble with voices and footsteps and a whole orchestral range of book-related noises—the snap of covers clapping shut; the breathy whisk of pages fanning open; the distinctive thunk of one book being stacked on another; the grumble of book carts in the corridors.

The library is a prerequisite to let citizens make use of their right to information and freedom of speech. Free access to information is necessary in a democratic society, for open debate and creation of public opinion.

Taking books away from a culture is to take away its shared memory. It’s like taking away the ability to remember your dreams. Destroying a culture’s books is sentencing it to something worse than death: It is sentencing it to seem as if it never lived.

On a library bookshelf, thought progresses in a way that is logical but also dumbfounding, mysterious, irresistible.

I loved the fresh alkaline tang of new ink and paper, a smell that never emanated from a broken-in library book. I loved the crack of a newly flexed spine, and the way the brand-new pages almost felt damp, as if they were wet with creation.

Once words and thoughts are poured into them, books are no longer just paper and ink and glue: They take on a kind of human vitality.

A library is a good place to soften solitude; a place where you feel part of a conversation that has gone on for hundreds and hundreds of years even when you’re all alone.

I found myself wondering whether a shared memory can exist if one of the people sharing it no longer remembers it. Is the circuit broken, the memory darkened?

Libraries are physical spaces belonging to a community where we gather to share information. There isn’t anywhere else that fits that description.

A book feels like a thing alive in this moment, and also alive in a continuum, from the moment the thoughts about it first percolated in the writer's mind to the moment it sprang from the printing press -- a lifeline that continues as someone sits with it and marvels over it, and it continues on, ...

In Senegal, the polite expression for saying someone died is to say his or her library has burned.

They formed a human chain, passing the books hand over hand from one person to the next, through the smoky building and out the door. It was as if, in this urgent moment, the people of Los Angeles formed a living library. They created, for that short time, a system to protect and pass along shared knowledge, to save what we know for each other, which is what libraries do every day.

Libraries were a solace in the Depression. They were warm and dry and useful and free; they provided a place for people to be together in a desolate time. You could feel prosperous at the library. There was so much there, such an abundance, when everything else felt scant and ravaged, and you could take any of it home for free. Or you could just sit at a reading table and take it all in.

New Orleans is not in the grip of a neurosis of a denied past; it passes out memories generously like a great lord; it doesn't have to pursue "the real thing.

Throughout her life, Warren published little tip sheets — 'Althea's Ways to Achieve Reading' — to encourage people to find time for books. She approved of fibbing if it gave you an additional opportunity read. 'The night you promised to go to dinner with the best friend of your foster aunt, just telephone that you have such a bad cold you're afraid she'll catch it,' she wrote in one of her tip sheets. 'Stay at home instead and gobble Lucy Gayheart in one gulp like a boa constrictor.

There are so many things in a library, so many books and so much stuff, that I sometimes wondered if any one single person could possibly know what all of it is. I preferred thinking that no one does—I liked the idea that the library is more expansive and grand than one single mind, and that it requires many people together to form a complete index of its bounty.

It wasn’t that time stopped in the library. It was as if it were captured here, collected here, and in all libraries—and not only my time, my life, but all human time as well. In the library, time is dammed up—not just stopped but saved. The library is a gathering pool of narratives and of the people who come to find them. It is where we can glimpse immortality; in the library, we can live forever.

Perspective was my secret weapon, and books gave me plenty of ammunition.

World War II destroyed more books and libraries than any event in human history. The Nazis alone destroyed an estimated hundred million books during their twelve years in power.

The library is a whispering post. You don't need to take a book off a shelf to know there is a voice inside that is waiting to speak to you, and behind that was someone who truly believed that if he or she spoke, someone would listen.

I loved wandering around the bookshelves, scanning the spines until something happened to catch my eye. Those visits were dreamy, frictionless interludes that promised I would leave richer than I arrived. It wasn't like going to a store with my mom, which guaranteed a tug-of-war between what I wanted and what my mother was willing to buy me; in the library I could have anything I wanted.

A book feels like a thing alive in the moment, and also alive on a continuum, from the moment the thoughts about it first percolated in the writer's mind to the moment it sprang off the printing press - a lifeline that continues as someone sits with it and marvels over it, and it continues on, time after time after time.

This book is dedicated to Thomas Coleman, a retired longshoreman, who died in his attic at 2214 St. Roch Avenue in New Orleans’ 8th Ward on or about August 29, 2005. He had a can of juice and a bedspread at his side when the waters rose. There were more than a thousand like him.

This is why I wanted to write this book, to tell about a place I love that doesn’t belong to me but feels like it is mine, and how that feels marvelous and exceptional. All the things that are wrong in the world seem conquered by a library’s simple unspoken promise: Here I am, please tell me your story; here is my story, please listen.

It seems simple to define what a library is—namely, it is a storeroom of books. But the more time I spent at Central, the more I realized that a library is an intricate machine, a contraption of whirring gears. There were days when I came to the library and planted myself near the center of the main corridor and simply watched the whirl and throb of the place. Sometimes people ambled by, with no apparent destination. Some people marched crisply, full of purpose. Many were alone, some were in pairs; occasionally they traveled in a gaggle. People think that libraries are quiet, but they really aren't. They rumble with voices and footsteps and a whole orchestral range of book-related noises—the snap of covers clapping shut; the breathy whisk of pages fanning open; the distinctive thunk of one book being stacked on another; the grumble of book carts in the corridors.

I am happy if I can give them away or donate them. But I can’t throw a book in the trash, no matter how hard I try.

The next morning, close to two thousand people showed up at the library.

The words tasted sour. I agreed with Patrick. In New Orleans, sometimes death did feel more like socializing. And he knew better than anyone else. He frequented postmortem parties daily, trolling for books.

But, if you've decided to go out on a limb and kill one, for goodness' sake, be prepared. We all read, with dismay, the sad story of a good woman wronged in south Mississippi who took that option and made a complete mess of the entire thing. See, first she shot him. Well, she saw right off the bat that that was a mistake because then she had this enormous dead body to deal with. He was every bit as much trouble to her dead as he ever had been alive, and was getting more so all the time. So then, she made another snap decision to cut him up in pieces and dispose of him a hunk at a time. More poor planning. First, she didn't have the proper carving utensils on hand and hacking him up proved to be just a major chore, plus it made just this colossal mess on her off-white shag living room carpet. It's getting to be like the Cat in the Hat now, only Thing Two ain't showing up to help with the clean-up. She finally gets him into portable-size portions, and wouldn't you know it? Cheap trash bags. Can anything else possible go wrong for this poor woman? So, the lesson here is obvious--for want of a small chain saw, a roll of Visqueen and some genuine Hefty bags, she is in Parchman Penitentiary today instead of New Orleans, where she'd planned to go with her new boyfriend. Preparation is everything.

Walt also had a humorous sign posted outside the mansion, recruiting ghosts who wanted to enjoy 'active retirement' in the "country club atmosphere' of this 'fashionable address'. Interested ghosts were to write to the 'Ghost Relations Dept. Disneyland,' and were told,'Do not apply in person.

The idea of being forgotten is terrifying. I fear not just that I, personally, will be forgotten, but that we are all doomed to being forgotten—that the sum of life is ultimately nothing; that we experience joy and disappointment and aches and delights and loss, make our little mark on the world, and then we vanish, and the mark is erased, and it is as if we never existed. If you gaze into that bleakness even for a moment, the sum of life becomes null and void, because if nothing lasts, nothing matters. It means that everything we experience unfolds without a pattern, and life is just a wild, random, baffling occurrence, a scattering of notes with no melody. But if something you learn or observe or imagine can be set down and saved, and if you can see your life reflected in previous lives, and can imagine it reflected in subsequent ones, you can begin to discover order and harmony. You know that you are a part of a larger story that has shape and purpose—a tangible, familiar past and a constantly refreshed future. We are all whispering in a tin can on a string, but we are heard, so we whisper the message into the next tin can and the next string. Writing a book, just like building a library, is an act of sheer defiance. It is a declaration that you believe in the persistence of memory. In Senegal, the polite expression for saying someone died is to say his or her library has burned. When I first heard the phrase, I didn’t understand it, but over time I came to realize it was perfect. Our minds and souls contain volumes inscribed by our experiences and emotions; each individual’s consciousness is a collection of memories we’ve cataloged and stored inside us, a private library of a life lived. It is something that no one else can entirely share, one that burns down and disappears when we die. But if you can take something from that internal collection and share it—with one person or with the larger world, on the page or in a story recited—it takes on a life of its own.

I believe with all my heart that standing up for America means standing up for the God who has so blessed our land. We need God’s help to guide our nation through stormy seas. But we can’t expect Him to protect America in a crisis if we just leave Him over on the shelf in our day-to-day living. Speech, New Orleans, November 16, 1982

Quoting Althea Warren, librarians should "read as a drunkard drinks, or as a bird sings or a cat sleeps or a dog responds to an invitation to go walking, not from conscience or training, but because they'd rather do it than anything else in the world.

Another senior librarian I interviewed that day told me that seeing the library in ruins so traumatized her that she didn't get her period for the next four months.

They created, for that short time, a system to protect and pass along shared knowledge, to save what we know for each other, which is what libraries do every day.

I wanted to have my books around me, forming a totem pole of the narratives I’d visited.

do you think there are any conservative librarians?” Rosenberg was laughing so hard

people hack into the library to rehearse hacking into bigger, more secure, and more valuable targets.

The biggest library fire in American history had been upstaged by the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown.

In total, four hundred thousand books in Central Library were destroyed in the fire. An additional seven hundred thousand were badly damaged by either smoke or water or, in many cases, both. The number of books destroyed or spoiled was equal to the entirety of fifteen typical branch libraries. It was the greatest loss to any public library in the history of the United States.

As she said in a speech to a library association in 1935, librarians should “read as a drunkard drinks or as a bird sings or a cat sleeps or a dog responds to an invitation to go walking, not from conscience or training, but because they’d rather do it than anything else in the world.

if something you learn or observe or imagine can be set down and saved, and if you can see your life reflected in previous lives, and can imagine it reflected in subsequent ones, you can begin to discover order and harmony. You know that you are a part of a larger story that has shape and purpose—a tangible, familiar past and a constantly refreshed future. We are all whispering in a tin can on a string, but we are heard, so we whisper the message into the next tin can and the next string.

The idea of being forgotten is terrifying. I fear not just that I, personally, will be forgotten but that we are all doomed to being forgotten; that the sum of life is ultimately nothing; that we experience joy and disappointment and aches and delights and loss, make our little mark on the world, and then we vanish, and the mark is erased, and it is as if we never existed. If you gaze into that bleakness even for a moment, the sum of life becomes null and void, because if nothing lasts nothing matters. Everything we experience unfolds without a pattern, and life is just a baffling occurrence, a scattering of notes with no melody. But if something you learn or observe or imagine can be set down and saved, and if you can see your life reflected in previous lives, and can imagine it reflected in subsequent ones, you can begin to discover order and harmony. You know that you are a part of a larger story that has shape and purpose—a tangible, familiar past and a constantly refreshed future. We are all whispering in a tin can on a string, but we are heard, so we whisper the message into the next tin can and the next string. Writing a book is an act of sheer defiance. It is a declaration that you believe in the persistence of memory.

It was as if, in this urgent moment, the people of Los Angeles formed a living library. They created, for that short time, a system to protect and pass along shared knowledge, to save what we know for each other, which is what libraries do every day.

Burning books is an inefficient way to conduct a war, since books and libraries have no military value, but it is a devastating act. Destroying a library is a kind of terrorism. People think of libraries as the safest and most open places in society. Setting them on fire is like announcing that nothing, and nowhere, is safe. The deepest effect of burning books is emotional. When libraries burn, the books are sometimes described as being “wounded” or as “casualties,” just as human beings would be.

United Nations agenda. The manifesto states, “The library is a prerequisite to let citizens make use of their right to information and freedom of speech. Free access to information is necessary in a democratic society, for open debate and creation of public opinion.

He blamed television, movies, and books for his love of ghosts. It was a fascination that’s been with him since his youth. He always loved watching or reading anything that had to do with ghosts and haunted locations, especially historic sites like New Orleans, Salem, Tombstone, Gettysburg, and Old San Juan.

Sometimes it's harder to notice a place you think you know well; you eyes glide over it, seeing it but not seeing it at all. It's almost as if familiarity gives you a kind of temporary blindness. I had to force myself to look harder and try to see beyond the concept of library that was so latent in my brain.

Our visits to the library were never long enough for me. The place was so bountiful. I loved wandering around the bookshelves, scanning the spines until something happened to catch my eye. Those visits were dreamy, frictionless interludes that promised I would leave richer than I arrived. It wasn’t like going to a store with my mom, which guaranteed a tug-of-war between what I wanted and what my mother was willing to buy me; in the library I could have anything I wanted.

One time, in New Orleans at a youth convention for my church, I read out of the phone book during a talent show. I made it all the way to 'J' before people started booing.

times of trouble, libraries are sanctuaries. They become town squares and community centers—even blood-draw locations.

Apparently, everyone in Los Angeles gets on the computer right after Thanksgiving dinner and makes requests for diet books.

The water dumped on the fire was now as much a problem as a solution. The librarians always worried more about floods than fire, and now they had both.

We are all whispering in a tin can on a string, but we are heard, so we whisper the message into the next tin can and the next string.

I hope of all things, I forget you last, Ory. I hope I forget you even after I forget where we're going. I'd rather drive forever and never reach New Orleans, but still remember you

The library opened in January 1873. Membership was five dollars a year. At the time, five dollars represented several days' pay for an average worker, so only affluent people were able to join. Library rules were schoolmarmish and scoldy. Men were required to remove their hats upon entering the library, and patrons were discouraged from reading too many novels, lest they turn into what the association labeled "fiction fiends." Books considered to be "of dubious moral effect, or trashy, ill-written ones, or flabby ones" were excluded from the collection. Women were not allowed to use the main facilities, but a "Ladies Room" with a selection of magazines was added soon after the library opened. Children were not allowed in the library at all.

Sometimes it's harder to notice a place you think you know well; your eyes glide over it, seeing it but not seeing it at all. It's almost as if familiarity gives you a kind of temporary blindness.

librarians are in the library all day, and their jobs include handling difficult and sometimes violent people nearly every day. The topic is bigger than libraries; it is a topic for society to solve.

Goodhue wanted visitors to feel more than they were in a pretty building. He wanted them to feel they were part of a three-dimensional meditation on the power of human intellect and the potency of storytelling.

Books are a sort of cultural DNA, the code for who, as a society, we are, and what we know. All the wonders and failures, all the champions and villains, all the legends and ideas and revelations of a culture last forever in its books. Destroying those books is a way of saying that the culture itself no longer exists; its history has disappeared; the continuity between its past and its future is ruptured. Taking books away from a culture is to take away its shared memory. It’s like taking away the ability to remember your dreams. Destroying a culture’s books is sentencing it to something worse than death: It is sentencing it to seem as if it never lived.

A book feels like a thing alive in this moment, and also on a continuum, from the moment the thoughts about it first percolated in the writers mind to the moment it sprang off the printing press - a lifeline that continues as someone sits with it and marvels over it. Once words and thoughts are poured into them, books are no longer just paper and ink and glue: they take on a kind of human vitality. The poet Milton called this quality in books "the potency of life.

The first recorded instance of book burning was in 213 BC, when Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang decided to incinerate any history books that contradicted his version of the past. In addition, he buried more than four hundred scholars alive.

A library is a good place to soften solitude; a place where you feel part of a conversation that has gone on for hundreds and hundreds of years even when you're all alone. The library is a whispering post. You don't need to take a book off a shelf to know there is a voice inside that is waiting to speak to you, and behind that was someone who truly believed that if he or she spoke, someone would listen. It was that affirmation that always amazed me. Even the oddest, most particular book was written with that kind of crazy courage — the writer's belief that someone would find his or her book important to read. I was struck by how precious and foolish and brave that belief is, and how necessary, and how full of hope it is to collect these books and manuscripts and preserve them. It declares that all these stories matter, and so does every effort to create something that connects us to one another, and to our past and to what is still to come.

In 1973, the library even added a service called the Hoot Owl Telephonic Reference, which operated from nine P.M. until one A.M., long after the library was closed. Dialing H-O-O-T-O-W-L connected you to a librarian who could find the answer to almost any question. The Hoot Owl slogan was “Win Your Bet Without a Fight.” Apparently, in the late evening, people all over Los Angeles did a lot of betting on trivia such as the correct names of the Seven Dwarves. The service got a call every three minutes, adding up to about thirty-five thousand a year. Hoot Owl was a favorite target of conservative groups, who believed it catered to “hippies and other night people.” But the library persisted, and Hoot Owl operated every weeknight until the end of 1976.

In Los Angeles, moments were fortune cookies ready to be cracked open, and in them you might find a movie star, or a successful audition, or a chance encounter with a powerful person who, with a snap of his fingers, would change your life, like a wizard.

Notionally, it was the anchor of the region, but it existed at such a spiritual and sociological remove that it could have been the moon. Most likely, people settling in the San Jacinto Valley hoped not to make their way closer to Los Angeles but to make their way farther from it.

they also believed that you read a book for the experience of reading it. You didn’t read it in order to have an object that had to be housed and looked after forever, a memento of the purpose for which it was obtained. The reading of the book was a journey. There was no need for souvenirs.

In Senegal, the polite expression for saying someone died is to say his or her library has burned. When I first heard the phrase, I didn’t understand it, but over time I came to realize it was perfect. Our minds and souls contain volumes inscribed by our experiences and emotions; each individual’s consciousness is a collection of memories we’ve cataloged and stored inside us, a private library of a life lived. It is something that no one else can entirely share, one that burns down and disappears when we die. But if you can take something from that internal collection and share it—with one person or with the larger world, on the page or in a story recited—it takes on a life of its own.

The city of Los Angeles—dirty, motley, teeming with immigrants and actors—was only an hour away. Notionally, it was the anchor of the region, but it existed at such a spiritual and sociological remove that it could have been the moon. Most likely, people settling in the San Jacinto Valley hoped not to make their way closer to Los Angeles but to make their way farther from it.

The last and final burning, which erased it from history forever, occurred in AD 640. By that time, the library was awe-inspiring and a little scary. People had begun to believe it was a living thing—an enormous, infinite communal brain containing all the existing knowledge in the entire world, with the potential for the sort of independent intelligence we now fear in supercomputers.

Merchants and charlatans gained control of Europe, calling their insidious gospel “The Enlightenment.” The day of the locust was at hand, but from the ashes of humanity there arose no Phoenix. The humble and pious peasant, Piers Plowman, went to town to sell his children to the lords of the New Order for purposes that we may call questionable at best. (See Reilly, Ignatius J., Blood on Their Hands: The Crime of It All, A study of some selected abuses in sixteenth-century Europe, a Monograph, 2 pages, 1950, Rare Book Room, Left Corridor, Third Floor, Howard-Tilton Memorial Library, Tulane University, New Orleans 18, Louisiana. Note: I mailed this singular monograph to the library as a gift; however, I am not really certain that it was ever accepted. It may well have been thrown out because it was only written in pencil on tablet paper.) The gyro had widened; The Great Chain of Being had snapped like so many paper clips strung together by some drooling idiot; death, destruction, anarchy, progress, ambition, and self-improvement were to be Piers’ new fate. And a vicious fate it was to be: now he was faced with the perversion of having to GO TO WORK.

We were very much a reading family, but we were a borrow-a-book-from-the-library family more than a bookshelves-full-of-books family. My parents valued books, but the grew up in the Depression, aware of the quicksilver nature of money, and they learned the hard way that you shouldn't buy what you could borrow. Because of that frugality, or perhaps independent of it, they also believed that you read a book for the experience of reading it.

Twenty thousand schoolkids and two thousand adults entered the Save the Books essay contest in LA, which offered round-trip tickets to Europe among its prizes. The essay subject was “What the Library Means to Me.” Ray Bradbury was one of the judges. The winning essays were deep, disquieting, and darkly emotional. Most of them read like confessions of an almost brutal sense of loneliness, eased only by a place like the library, where lonely people can feel slightly less lonely together.

Ever since I could remember reading, I was a fan of Horror Novels, then just an Avid reader of all things dark and deeply written or off the cuff styles and not so bland and sterile as if the grammar police forensically wrote it to be safe, then re-edited it to be even more annoyingly not from an emotion but from a text book, I love dark dark fiction that's why i write it. Some of my favorite writers are Anne Rice, Hunter S. Thompson and Clive Barker, perhaps you can sense this in my writing.

She went around reading everything- the directions on the grits bag, Tate's notes, and the stories from her fairy-tale books she had pretended to read for years. Then one night she made a little oh sound, and took the old Bible from the shelf. Sitting at the table, she turned the thin pages carefully to the one with the family names. She found her own at the very bottom: There it was, her birthday: Miss Catherine Danielle Clark, October 10, 1945. Then, going back up the list, she read the real names of her brothers and sisters: Master Jeremy Andrew Clark, January 2, 1939. "Jeremy," she said out loud. "Jodie, I sure never thought a' you as Master Jeremy." Miss Amanda Margaret Clark, May 17, 1937. Kya touched the name with her fingers. Repeated it several times. She read on. Master Napier Murphy Clark, April 14, 1936. Kya spoke softly, "Murph, ya name was Napier." At the top, the oldest, Miss Mary Helen Clark, September 19, 1934. She rubbed her fingers over the names again, which brought faces before her eyes. They blurred, but she could see them all squeezed around the table eating stew, passing cornbread, even laughing some. She was ashamed that she had forgotten their names, but now that she'd found them, she would never let them go again. Above the list of children she read: Mister Jackson Henry Clark married Miss Julienne Maria Jacques, June 12, 1933. Not until that moment had she known her parents' proper names. She sat there for a few minutes with the Bible open on the table. Her family before her. Time ensures children never know their parents young. Kya would never see the handsome Jake swagger into an Asheville soda fountain in early 1930, where he spotted Maria Jacques, a beauty with black curls and red lips, visiting from New Orleans.

who could blame them if they said "the hell with the rest of the world." Let somebody else buy the bonds. Let somebody else build or repair foreign dams, or design foreign buildings that won't shake apart in earthquakes." When the railways of France, and Germany, and India were breaking down through age, it was the Americans who rebuilt them. When the Pennsylvania Railroad and the New York Central went broke, nobody loaned them an old caboose. Both of 'em are still broke. I can name to you 5,000 times when the Americans raced to the help of other people in trouble. Can you name to me even one time when someone else raced to the Americans in trouble? I don't think there was outside help even during the San Francisco earthquake. Our neighbors have faced it alone, and I am one Canadian who is damned tired of hearing them kicked around. They'll come out of this thing with their flag high. And when they do, they're entitled to thumb their noses at the lands that are gloating over their present troubles. I hope Canada is not one of these. But there are many smug, self-righteous Canadians. And finally, the American Red Cross was told at its 48th Annual meeting in New Orleans this morning that it was broke. This year's disasters -- with the year less than half-over -- has taken it all. And nobody, but nobody, has helped. -  Gordon Sinclair via Radio Broadcast June 5, 1973 from Ontario, Canada

The problem was that I have never been able to do harm to a book. Even books I don’t want, or books that are so worn out and busted that they can’t be read any longer, cling to me like thistles. I pile them up with the intention of throwing them away, and then, every time, when the time comes, I can’t. I am happy if I can give them away or donate them. But I can’t throw a book in the trash, no matter how hard I try. At the last minute, something glues my hands to my sides, and a sensation close to revulsion rises up in me. Many times, I have stood over a trash can, holding a book with a torn cover and a broken binding, and I have hovered there, dangling the book, and finally, I have let the trash can lid snap shut and I have walked away with the goddamn book—a battered, dog-eared, wounded soldier that has been spared to live another day. The only thing that comes close to this feeling is what I experience when I try to throw out a plant, even if it is the baldest, most aphid-ridden, crooked-stemmed plant in the world. The sensation of dropping a living thing into the trash is what makes me queasy. To have that same feeling about a book might seem strange, but this is why I have come to believe that books have souls—why else would I be so reluctant to throw one away? It doesn’t matter that I know I’m throwing away a bound, printed block of paper that is easily reproduced. It doesn’t feel like that. A book feels like a thing alive in this moment, and also alive on a continuum, from the moment the thoughts about it first percolated in the writer’s mind to the moment it sprang off the printing press—a lifeline that continues as someone sits with it and marvels over it, and it continues on, time after time after time. Once words and thoughts are poured into them, books are no longer just paper and ink and glue: They take on a kind of human vitality.

Thus it appears that the sweltering inhabitants of Charleston and New Orleans, of Madras and Bombay and Calcutta, drink at my well. In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat–Geeta, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial; and I doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its sublimity from our conceptions. I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Bramin, priest of Brahma and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water jug. I meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and our buckets as it were grate together in the same well. The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges. With favoring winds it is wafted past the site of the fabulous islands of Atlantis and the Hesperides, makes the periplus of Hanno, and, floating by Ternate and Tidore and the mouth of the Persian Gulf, melts in the tropic gales of the Indian seas, and is landed in ports of which Alexander only heard the names.

POEM – MY AMAZING TRAVELS [My composition in my book Travel Memoirs with Pictures] My very first trip I still cannot believe Was planned and executed with such great ease. My father, an Inspector of Schools, was such a strict man, He gave in to my wishes when I told him of the plan. I got my first long vacation while working as a banker One of my co-workers wanted a travelling partner. She visited my father and discussed the matter Arrangements were made without any flutter. We travelled to New York, Toronto, London, and Germany, In each of those places, there was somebody, To guide and protect us and to take us wonderful places, It was a dream come true at our young ages. We even visited Holland, which was across the Border. To drive across from Germany was quite in order. Memories of great times continue to linger, I thank God for an understanding father. That trip in 1968 was the beginning of much more, I visited many countries afterward I am still in awe. Barbados, Tobago, St. Maarten, and Buffalo, Cirencester in the United Kingdom, Miami, and Orlando. I was accompanied by my husband on many trips. Sisters, nieces, children, grandchildren, and friends, travelled with me a bit. Puerto Rico, Los Angeles, New York, and Hialeah, Curacao, Caracas, Margarita, Virginia, and Anguilla. We sailed aboard the Creole Queen On the Mississippi in New Orleans We traversed the Rockies in Colorado And walked the streets in Cozumel, Mexico. We were thrilled to visit the Vatican in Rome, The Trevi Fountain and the Colosseum. To explore the countryside in Florence, And to sail on a Gondola in Venice. My fridge is decorated with magnets Souvenirs of all my visits London, Madrid, Bahamas, Coco Cay, Barcelona. And the Leaning Tower of Pisa How can I forget the Spanish Steps in Rome? Stratford upon Avon, where Shakespeare was born. CN Tower in Toronto so very high I thought the elevator would take me to the sky. Then there was El Poble and Toledo Noted for Spanish Gold We travelled on the Euro star. The scenery was beautiful to behold! I must not omit Cartagena in Columbia, Anaheim, Las Vegas, and Catalina, Key West, Tampa, Fort Lauderdale, and Pembroke Pines, Places I love to lime. Of course, I would like to make special mention, Of two exciting cruises with Royal Caribbean. Majesty of the Seas and Liberty of the Seas Two ships which grace the Seas. Last but not least and best of all We visited Paris in the fall. Cologne, Dusseldorf, and Berlin Amazing places, which made my head, spin. Copyright@BrendaMohammed

The idea of being forgotten is terrifying. I fear not just that I, personally, will be forgotten, but that we are all doomed to being forgotten—that the sum of life is ultimately nothing; that we experience joy and disappointment and aches and delights and loss, make our little mark on the world, and then we vanish, and the mark is erased, and it is as if we never existed. If you gaze into that bleakness even for a moment, the sum of life becomes null and void, because if nothing lasts, nothing matters. It means that everything we experience unfolds without a pattern, and life is just a wild, random, baffling occurrence, a scattering of notes with no melody. But if something you learn or observe or imagine can be set down and saved, and if you can see your life reflected in previous lives, and can imagine it reflected in subsequent ones, you can begin to discover order and harmony. You know that you are a part of a larger story that has shape and purpose—a tangible, familiar past and a constantly refreshed future. We are all whispering in a tin can on a string, but we are heard, so we whisper the message into the next tin can and the next string. Writing a book, just like building a library, is an act of sheer defiance. It is a declaration that you believe in the persistence of memory.