#bra

But about the drip drip of long-haul, no-end-in-sight solitude, they know nothing. They don't know what it is to construct an entire weekend around a visit to the laundrette. Or to sit in a darkened flat on Halloween night, because you can't bear to expose your bleak evening to a crowd of jeering trick-or-treaters. Or to have the librarian smile pityingly and say, ‘Goodness, you're a quick reader!’ when you bring back seven books, read from cover to cover, a week after taking them out. They don't know what it is to be so chronically untouched that the accidental brush of a bus conductor's hand on your shoulder sends a jolt of longing straight to your groin. ↗

— Zoë Heller

#loneliness #writers #librarians

The Unknown is not the Unknowable; it need not remain the unknown for us, unless we choose ignorance or persist in our first limitations. For to all things that are not unknowable, all things in the universe, there correspond in that universe faculties which can take cognisance of them, and in man, the microcosm, these faculties are always existant and at a certain stage capable of development. We may choose not to develop them; where they are partially developed, we may discourage and impose on them a kind of atrophy. But, fundamentally all possible knowledge is knowledge within the power of humanity. And since in man there is the inalienable impulse of Nature towards self-realisation, no struggle of the intellect to limit the action of our capacities within a determined area can for ever prevail. ↗

— Sri Aurobindo

#knowledge #mind #philosophy #self #truth

Books are only half our job ; the other half is human nature. ↗

— Mary Virginia Provines

#human-nature #job #librarians #library #people

While science can be many things, above all it is a way for our mistake-making, illusion-prone, storytelling brains to compare different methods for describing nature. ↗

— Mike McRae

#nature #science #scientific-method #storytelling #nature

I attempted in vain to calculate the size of the holdings on the shelves, floor on floor, only to boggle hopelessly, baffled by bibliographic boundlessness. ↗

— Richard Fortey

#nature

Words have power, you understand? It is in the nature of our universe. Our library itself distorts time and space on quite a grand scale. Well, when the Post Office started accumulating letters, it was storing words. In fact, what was being created was what we call a 'gevaisa', a tomb of living words. ↗

— Terry Pratchett

#gevaisa #library #words #nature

Liberalism is the ideology of Western suicide. When once this initial and final sentence is understood, everything about liberalism - the beliefs, emotions and values associated with it, the nature of its enchantment, its practical record, its future - falls into place. ↗

— Kyle Bristow

#brainwashed #liberal #liberalism #values #nature

She's right, of course. My mother usually is. She's a librarian. ↗

— Heather Vogel Frederick

#much-ado-about-anne #librarians

I have a self-made quote: Celebrate diversity, practice acceptance and may we all choose peaceful options to conflict. ↗

— Donzella Michele Malone

#celebrate #conflict #diversity #inspirational #peace

We regard promissory materialism as superstition without a rational foundation. The more we discover about the brain, the more clearly do we distinguish between the brain events and the mental phenomena, and the more wonderful do both the brain events and the mental phenomena become. Promissory materialism is simply a religious belief held by dogmatic materialists . . . who often confuse their religion with their science. ↗

— John C. Eccles

#dogmatism #materialism #mind #religion