Cass County Public Library Quotes

He'd been down at the Cass County Library, reading...Win danced a jig he thought that was so funny...about this cat Henry David Thoreau, which he pronounced Toe-Row. He read about his life and read some of his writings and this cat really had his shit together...Toe-Row knew better than anybody that Life is a Big Fat Asshole with everybody trying to Stick It To You when they get half the chance. ~ Joe Eszterhas

If you wanted to kill a city, that is the recipe. And yet Flint was very much alive. In 2014, the year of switch to a new source of drinking water, it was the seventh-largest city in the state. On weekdays, its population swelled as people commuted into town for work in teh county government, the region's major medical centers, four college campuses, and other economic anchors. For all the empty space, teens in shining dresses still posed for prom photos in the middle of Saginaw Street, the bumpy brick road that is Flint's main thoroughfare. Parents still led their children by the hand into the public library for Saturday story time. Older gentlemen lingered at the counter of one of Flint's ubiquitous Coney Island diners, and the waitresses at Grandma's Kitchen on Richfield Road kept the coffee flowing. For about ninety-nine thousand people, Flint was home. ~ Anna Clark

Our sense that a library is a public good and our idea of what such a place should look like derived precisely from a model created in Rome several thousand years ago. ~ Stephen Greenblatt

I was always looking ahead. I used to do all kinds of things for entertainment. When I was young, we had no radio, no TV. We were 30 miles from the public library, out in the sticks in Western Kansas, and so I'd do arithmetic exercises. ~ Clyde Tombaugh

On a grander scale, the New York Public library - and in fact the entire U.S. Library system - was founded and funded by those who relentlessly pursued money. ~ Mike Cernovich

Simply as a writer of books I'm thrilled and proud that Seattle should have raised, on a public vote, sufficient money to build a central library, and moreover to rebuild every other library in the city: 28 of them. ~ Jonathan Raban

We moved from the East coast to the town of Spokane, Washington, when I was about 13 years old, and I did not adapt very well to the, to the style of the place, and I spent most of my time in the public library. ~ Irwin Rose

It had always been my habit-- privately I felt it to be an ecstasy-- to enter, as into a mysterious vault, any public library. I was drawn to books that had been read before, novels that girls like myself had cradled and cherished. In my mind-- I suppose in my isolation-- I seized on all those previous readers, and everyone who would read after me, as phantom companions and secret friends. ~ Cynthia Ozick

In the little town where I live in Hampshire County, Massachusetts, we now have a 'Public Safety Complex' around the corner from what used to be our hokey Andy Griffith-esque fire station. ~ Rachel Maddow

Much have I travelled in the realms of gold for which I thank the Paddington and Westminster Public Libraries. ~ Peter Porter

Today the sight that discourages book people most is to walk into a public library and see computers where books used to be. In many cases not even the librarians want books to be there. What consumers want now is information, and information increasingly comes from computers.
That is a preference I can't grasp, much less share, though I'm well aware that computers have many valid uses. They save lives, and they make research in most cases a thing that's almost instantaneous.
They do many good things.
But they don't really do what books do, and why should they usurp the chief function of a public library, which is to provide readers access to books? Books can accommodate the proximity of computers but it doesn't seem to work the other way around. Computers now literally drive out books from the place that should, by definition, be books' own home: the library. ~ Larry McMurtry

Ministers of the Gospel are excluded [from serving as Visitors of the county Elementary Schools] to avoid jealousy from the other sects, were the public education committed to the ministers of a particular one; and with more reason than in the case of their exclusion from the legislative and executive functions. ~ Thomas Jefferson

The point is not that books, magazines, and DVDs are dead - far from it. At places such as the redesigned Boston Public Library, popular publications and media materials in physical form circulate rapidly from prominent spaces close to the building's entrance. The point is that people's information habits have undergone a sea change - a major shift toward the digital. Libraries are trying to serve a wide range of patrons at many different points along an "adoption curve," with all-print at one end and all-digital at the other. ~ John Palfrey

We have all sorts of conditions of booksellers: one is fanatic on the subject of libraries. He thinks that every public library should be dynamited. Another thinks that moving pictures will destroy the book trade. What rot! Surely everything that arouses people's minds, that makes them alert and questing, increases their appetite for books. - Roger Mifflin ~ Christopher Morley

Libraries should be open to all - except the censor.
[Response to questionnaire in Saturday Review, October 29 1960] ~ John F. Kennedy

Sure." Olivia smirked. "Good ol' New York Public Library. I'm sure it's up to date on the latest Demons that escape through well-guarded Demon Gates. ~ Cheyenne McCray

Freedom is a public library. ~ Paula Fox

You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library. ~ Matt Damon

All around the United States of America - in the cities and the counties - our public education is suffering and has been suffering. Cuts, cuts, cuts. ~ Bill Cosby

To all those who face change without fear. Go forward. To the ever-transforming glory of the public library, without which we would all be diminished. No one with a book is ever alone, even in the darkest moments. We are all book lovers. And we all chase the Great Library of Alexandria, one book at a time. ~ Rachel Caine

Access to public libraries also affects how much children read. ~ Stephen D. Krashen

Few things would gratify me as much as a rediscovered respect for things belonging to others. Not abusing the property of others (or that of the community) is one of the ways in which we respect others. It is an essential part of being considerate guests, no matter where we are: in an airplane, in a friend's home, in a movie theater, in a doctor's office, in a public library, or in a public square. ~ P. M. Forni

Slartibartfast's study was a total mess, like the results of an explosion in a public library. ~ Douglas Adams

It was from my own early experience that I decided there was no use to which money could be applied so productive of good to girls and boys who have good within them and ability and ambition to develop it as the founding of a public library. ~ Andrew Carnegie

I moved to New York City in '92 and had no money. I had a lot of free time, as actors do. I would go to the New York Public Library at Lincoln Center. ~ Denis O'Hare

The library is the temple of learning, and learning has liberated more people than all the wars in history ~ Carl T. Rowan

The Battle Creek, Michigan, headquarters of Kellogg's looks like a spaceship built to look like a pyramid that was then hastily converted into a public library during a period of intergalactic peace. ~ B.J. Novak

Loaded with note cards for research papers that I was hopelessly behind on, I'd enter the Public Library only to end up wandering around lost, wasting the day. ~ Stuart Dybek

The door available to everyone that can lead to happiness & success is the modest door of the public library. I found it to be so in my own life and work. ~ Herman Wouk

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

The founding of libraries was like constructing more public granaries, amassing reserves against a spiritual winter which by certain signs, in spite of myself, I see ahead ... ~ Marguerite Yourcenar

Dulcie always found a public library a little upsetting, for one saw so many odd people there ... ~ Barbara Pym

One of the most subversive institutions in the United States is the public library.. ~ Bell Hooks