A library doesn't need windows. A library is a window.
Interpretation
A library serves as an opening to knowledge and imagination, rather than just a physical space.
In this quote, Stewart Brand emphasizes the idea that a library transcends its physical structure; it is not merely a collection of books but a gateway to new ideas, perspectives, and experiences. By likening a library to a window, he suggests that it offers insight and access to a world of information, fostering intellectual growth and creativity in individuals and society as a whole.
In practice
In a presentation about the importance of education, you could say, 'As Stewart Brand wisely noted, a library isn't just a building; it's a gateway to new worlds.'
On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.
The urgent finds you; you have to find the important. Importance is not fast. It is slow. It is not superficial. It is deep. And as a result, it's extremely powerful. When important matters go wrong, they undermine everything. When they go right, they sustain everything.
Science is the only news. When you scan a news portal or magazine, all the human interest stuff is the same old he-said-she-said, the politics and economics the same cyclical dramas, the fashions a pathetic illusion of newness; even the technology is predictable if you know the science behind it. Human nature doesn't change much; science does, and the change accrues, altering the world irreversibly
Like a stool which needs three legs to be stable, mathematics education needs three components: good problems, with many of them being multi-step ones, a lot of technical skill, and then a broader view which contains the abstract nature of mathematics and proofs. One does not get all of these at once, but a good mathematics program has them as goals and makes incremental steps toward them at all levels.
You become a good writer just as you become a good joiner: by planing down your sentences.
Back to culture. Yes, actually to culture. You canβt consume much if you sit still and read books.
The world is a university and everyone in it is a teacher. Make sure when you wake up in the morning you go to school.
Make this the golden rule, the equivalent of the Hippocratic oath: Everything we ask a child to do should be worth doing.
I feel like I am walking in some amazing footsteps of writers who have come before me, like S.E. Hinton, Walter Dean Myers, Christopher Paul Curtis, Richard Peck and Kate DiCamillo, who I love.
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