Category Archives: Quotes

Ray Bradbury Said (II)

You see, libraries is people. It’s not books.

People are waiting in there, thousands of people, who wrote the books. So it’s much more personal than just a book. So when you open a book, the person pops out and becomes you. You look at Charles Dickens, and you are Charles Dickens, and he is you. So you go in the library and you pull a book off the shelf, and you open it, and what are you looking for? A mirror. All of a sudden, a mirror is there and you see yourself, but your name is Charles Dickens. That’s what a library is. Or the book is Shakespeare, and so you become William Shakespeare or you become Emily Dickinson or Robert Frost or all the great poets. So you find the author who can lead you through the dark.

—NEA Big Read

What Oriah Mountain Dreamer Said

“It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for – and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart’s longing. It doesn’t interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool – for love – for your dreams – for the adventure of being alive.”

— Oriah Mountain Dreamer

What William Carlos Williams Said

Poetry has to do with the dynamization of emotion into a separate form. This is the force of imagination.

What Robert Frost Said

‘Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in.’

Wallace Stevens Said

“Words add to the senses. The words for the dazzle
Of mica, the dithering of grass,
The Arachne integument of dead trees,
Are the eye grown larger, more intense.”

— from “Variations on a Summer Day” by Wallace Stevens