Sam Stockton > Sam's Quotes

“A university is just a group of buildings gathered around a library.”
― Shelby Foote

“The very existence of libraries affords the best evidence that we may yet have hope for the future of man”
― T.S. Eliot

“The classroom was a jail of other people’s interests. The library was open, unending, free.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates

“What a school thinks about its library is a measure of what it feels about education.”
― Harold Howe

“A public library is the most democratic thing in the world. What can be found there has undone dictators and tyrants: demagogues can persecute writers and tell them what to write as much as they like, but they cannot vanish what has been written in the past, though they try often enough...People who love literature have at least part of their minds immune from indoctrination. If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.”
― Doris Lessing

“I had found my religion: nothing seemed more important to me than a book. I saw the library as a temple.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words: The Autobiography of Jean-Paul Sartre

“Libraries are not made; they grow. Good as it is to inherit a library, it is better to collect one.”
― Augustine Birrell

“A library was nothing without its people. You say library and there’s this iconoclastic image of an old-lady librarian telling people to be quiet and not to run. But the thing was, that lady—that iconoclastic lady—was with us when we cleaned. She wore blue jeans, too. Maybe she was what people thought about when you said library, but she didn’t make the library. People made the library. That’s what made a library. Without them, all the sacredness was gone. It was just a building with books.”
― Scott Douglas

“A library doesn't need windows. A library is a window.”
― Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built

“I was under the librarians' protection. Civil servants and servants of civility, they had my back. They would be whatever they needed to be that day: information professionals, teachers, police, community organizers, computer technicians, historians, confidantes, clerks, social workers, storytellers, or, in this case, guardians of my peace.”
― Marilyn Johnson, This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All

“I was certain t find the familiar sting of salt, but what I needed to know was what kind: kitchen, sweat, tears or the sea.”
― Monique Truong, The Book of Salt

“Victims exist in a society that tells us our purpose is to be an inspiring story. But sometimes the best we can do is tell you we're still here, and that should be enough. Denying darkness does not bring anyone closer to the light. When you hear a story about rape, all the graphic and unsettling details, resist the instinct to turn away; instead loo closer, because beneath the gore and the police reports is a whole, beautiful person, looking for ways to be in the world again.”
― Chanel Miller, Know My Name

“Did you know PTSD is the only mental illness you can give someone? A person gave it to me. A man actually drove me crazy. He transmitted this condition. Like the man who gave my gay cousin HIV, or like my grandfather, who gave my grandmother the clap. You can “get” schizophrenia or bipolar in the genetic sense. You might inherit genes that predispose you toward hearing voices or intense fluctuation of mood. In that sense, these conditions are “given” to you. But they aren’t given to you in the same way watching your father cut off your mother’s head on Christmas gives you PTSD.”
― Myriam Gurba, Mean