It's enough for you to do it once for a few men to remember you. But if you do it year after year, then many people remember you and they tell it to their children, and their children and grandchildren remember and, if it concerns books, they can read them. And if it's good enough, it will last as long as there are human beings.
If only I could manage, without annoyance to my family, to get imprisoned for 10 years, "without hard labour," and with the use of books and writing materials, it would be simply delightful!
Like an unexpected wet mop in the face of tired complacency, The Sovereignty Solution works on the receptive mind as a pry bar works on a tightly sealed box. Written with courage and passion, this is a book whose often counterintuitive clarity shakes entombed assumptions like an earthquake. Whether you end up convinced or not, you will never think about American national security the same way ever again.
A big leather-bound volume makes an ideal razorstrap. A thing book is useful to stick under a table with a broken caster to steady it. A large, flat atlas can be used to cover a window with a broken pane. And a thick, old-fashioned heavy book with a clasp is the finest thing in the world to throw at a noisy cat.
I interviewed - no - had lunch with Harper Lee several years ago, trying to convince Harper Lee to do "To Kill a Mockingbird" for the book club. She wouldn't do it. She said, "Honey, I said everything I wanted to say."
Yet the basic fact remains: every regulation represents a restriction of liberty, every regulation has a cost. That is why, like marriage (in the Prayer Book's words), regulation should not "be enterprised, nor taken in hand, unadvisedly, lightly, or wantonly"
I think bridges have a special meaning in our life. I think a book is a bridge. Any type of art is a bridge that allows different cultures to connect. You may not understand your neighbour's way of seeing life, but you sure understand your neighbour's joy in painting or dancing.
An extraterrestrial being, newly arrived on Earth - scrutinizing what we mainly present to our children in television, radio, movies, newspapers, magazines, the comics, and many books - might easily conclude that we are intent on teaching them murder, rape, cruelty, superstition, credulity, and consumerism. We keep at it, and through constant repetition many of them finally get it.
Studies are the food of youth, the delight of old age; the ornament of prosperity, the refuge and comfort of adversity; a delight at home, and no hindrance abroad; they are companions by night, and in travel, and in the country.
I was under twenty when I deliberately put it to myself one night after good conversation that there are moments when we actually touch in talk what the best writing can only come near. The curse of our book language is not so much that it keeps forever to the same set phrases . . . but that it sounds forever with the same reading tones. We must go out into the vernacular for tones that haven't been brought to book.