Quotes

About books:

“For children, picture books provide a window onto the world; a way for them to delve into an array of situations, cultures and histories, to explore shapes, forms, line and color juxtaposed with words. Picture books give a child a sense of who they are in the world and who they may become. Just like the children who read them, by their very nature, picture books are important and a world without them is not worth imagining.”~Sean Qualls, children’s illustrator/artist

“I am eternally grateful for my knack of finding in great books, some of them very funny books, reason enough to feel honored to be alive, no matter what else might be going on.” ~Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake, 1997

“Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.”~Virginia Woolf from ‘Street Haunting: A London Adventure‘ in The Death of the Moth

“Except a living man, there is nothing more wonderful than a book!  A message to us from the dead, – from human souls whom we never saw, who lived perhaps thousands of miles away; and yet these, on those little sheets of paper, speak to us, teach us, comfort us, open their hearts to us as brothers.” ~Charles Kingsley

“He loved a book because it was a book; he loved its odor, its form, its title. What he loved in a manuscript was its old illegible date, the bizarre and strange Gothic characters, the heavy gilding which loaded its drawings. It was its pages covered with dust — dust of which he breathed the sweet and tender perfume with delight.” ~Gustave Flaubert

“…to name one passion among others, I have a more or less irresistable passion for books, and I have a need continually to educate myself, to study if you like, precisely as I need to eat my bread.” ~Vincent van Gogh, letter to Theo van Gogh, 22-24, 1880

About e-books:

“I hate them. It’s like making believe there’s another kind of sex. There isn’t another kind of sex. There isn’t another kind of book! A book is a book is a book.”
~Maurice Sendak about eBooks (source: Emma Brockes, The Guardian, 2011)

“Much is to be gained by eBooks: ease, convenience, portability. But something is definitely lost: tradition, a sensual experience, the comfort of thingy-ness — a little bit of humanity.” ~Chip Kidd, Associate Art Director, Knopf

About libraries:

“Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors. The library connects us with the insights and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from all of our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species. Public libraries depend on voluntary contributions. I think the health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all be tested by how well we support our libraries.”~Carl Sagan, excerpt from Cosmos (1980)