I was rather shocked when the evening news came on yesterday and I learned of some of the cuts proposed for the city of Toronto. The list is rather long and includes among other things: selling off the Toronto Zoo and the Sony Centre for the Performing Arts, implementing single police officer patrols, canceling public health funding for AIDS prevention and student nutrition…and closing libraries.
Believe me…the irony is not lost on me! Here I am raising money to build a library in Ethiopia!! and libraries right here at home in Canada may be closed
Anyway, it prompted me to think about what public and school libraries have meant to me and their value in society. Libraries have often had a bad rep…the whole musty dusty,”no talking” stereotype. But for many of us, it has been a library that has opened up our minds to the world.I love libraries and I LOVE to read. My idea of a perfect holiday is finding a place in a garden or by the water to read! It has been this way for as long as I can remember. As a child, I was encouraged to read and spent many summer days walking to the Kenilworth Library in Hamilton. Libraries are a sanctuary to me and I feel quite at home in them. I love books and having them around me. It was primarily through library books that I discovered the world and developed a thirst for learning and the desire to travel. As a student and teacher, I have worked and wiled away many an hour among the stacks. A library is also a place that brings people together and builds community. On so many levels, a library plays a very positive role in our societies. Even with changing technology, we still really need them! But, don’t take my word for it, have a look at what some others have to say about libraries.
A good library is a place, a palace where the lofty spirits of all nations and generations meet.” – Samuel Niger
“A house without books is like a room without windows. No man has a right to bring up children without surrounding them with books…. Children learn to read being in the presence of books.” – Horace Mann
“A library is a delivery room for the birth of ideas, a place where history comes to life.” – Norman Cousins
“I received the fundamentals of my education in school, but that was not enough. My real education, the superstructure, the details, the true architecture, I got out of the public library. For an impoverished child whose family could not afford to buy books, the library was the open door to wonder and achievement, and I can never be sufficiently grateful that I had the wit to charge through that door and make the most of it. Now, when I read constantly about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that the door is closing and that American society has found one more way to destroy itself.” – Isaac Asimov
“If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.” – Cicero
“My lifelong love affair with books and reading continues unaffected by automation, computers, and all other forms of the twentieth-century gadgetry.” – Robert Downs
“A library is not a luxury but one of the necessities of life.” -Henry Ward Beecher
“A little library growing each year is an honorable part of a man’s history.” -Henry Ward Beecher
“Libraries are not made, they grow.” -Augustine Birrell
“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.” -Jorge Luis Borges
“You must live feverishly in a library. Colleges are not going to do any good unless you are raised and live in a library everyday of your life.” —Ray Douglas Bradbury
“When I got [my] library card, that was when my life began.” -Rita Mae Brown
“When I discovered libraries, it was like having Christmas every day.” -Jean Fritz
“The library, I believe, is the last of our public institutions to which you can go without credentials. You don’t even need the sticker on your windshield that you need to get into the public beach. All you need is the willingness to read.” -Harry Golden
“What a school thinks about its library is a measure of what it thinks about education.” -Harold Howe, former U.S. Commissioner of Education
“Libraries are magical places. There’s nothing quite like strolling the hushed aisles, letting your eye rove along dimly lit shelves. Each spine, each title, seems to beckon with a promise of incredible wonders, surprises, and adventures.” -John Jakes
“Everything you need for better future and success has already been written. And guess what? All you have to do is go to the library.” -Jim Rohn
“A library should be like a pair of open arms.” -Roger Rosenblatt
“Since my family did not own many books or have the money for a child to buy them, it was good to know that solely by virtue of my municipal citizenship I had access to any book I wanted from the branch library I could walk to in my neighborhood.” -Philip Roth
“The library connects us with the insight 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 our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species. 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
“If it is noticed that much of my outside work concerns itself with libraries, there is an extremely good reason for this. I think that the better part of my education, almost as important as that secured in the schools and the universities, came from libraries.” -Irving Stone
“I’ve traveled the world twice over,
Met the famous; saints and sinners,
Poets and artists, kings and queens,
Old stars and hopeful beginners,
I’ve been where no-one’s been before,
Learned secrets from writers and cooks
All with one library ticket
To the wonderful world of books.”
-Unknown
So, need to beat the heat this week???
Don’t stay at home and watch mindless reality TV! Don’t make yet another unnecessary trip to the mall!
Head over to your local library…you won’t regret it! I’ll see you there!!!
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