A library is a place where you can lose your innocence without losing your virginity.
Interpretation
A library allows for exploration and growth of knowledge and ideas, often leading to a loss of naivety.
This quote highlights the transformative power of libraries as spaces for intellectual engagement. Germaine Greer suggests that within the walls of a library, one can explore complex ideas and confront challenging realities, leading to a maturation of thought and perspective, all while remaining in a safe and nurturing environment, thereby losing one's innocence in terms of naïveté rather than physical experiences.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of education, one might quote Germaine Greer to emphasize the role of libraries in personal development.
It is often falsely assumed, even by feminists, that sexuality is the enemy of the female who really wants to develop these aspects of her personality, and this is perhaps the most misleading aspect of movements like the National Organization of Women. It was not the insistence upon her sex that weakened the American woman student's desire to make something of her education, but the insistence upon a passive sexual role
The only perfect love to be found on earth is not sexual love, which is riddled with hostility and insecurity, but the wordless commitment of families, which takes as its model mother-love. This is not to say that fathers have no place, for father-love, with its driving for self-improvement and discipline, is also essential to survival, but that uncorrected father-love, father-love as it were practiced by both parents, is a way to annihilation.
Women live lives of continual apology. They are born and raised to take the blame for other people's behavior. If they are treated without respect, they tell themselves that they have failed to earn respect. If their husbands do not fancy them, it is because they are unattractive.
The wedding is the chief ceremony of the middle-class mythology, and it functions as the official entrée of the spouses to their middle-class status. This is the real meaning of saving up to get married. The young couple struggles to set up an image of comfortable life which they will be forced to live up to in the years that follow.
Guilt is one side of a nasty triangle; the other two are shame and stigma. This grim coalition combines to inculpate women themselves of the crimes committed against them.
Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.
Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst...They are for nothing but to inspire.
The man that I named the Giver passed along to the boy knowledge, history, memories, color, pain, laughter, love, and truth. Every time you place a book in the hands of a child, you do the same thing. It is very risky. But each time a child opens a book, he pushes open the gate that separates him from Elsewhere. It gives him choices. It gives him freedom. Those are magnificent, wonderfully unsafe things. [from her Newberry Award acceptance speech]
They call it coaching but it is teaching. You do not just tell them...you show them the reasons.
A book is a device to ignite the imagination.
The only advice ... that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions.
If the truth is told, the youth can grow.
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