Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future.
Interpretation
Libraries are essential for preserving knowledge and culture, linking us to our history and future.
Ray Bradbury's quote emphasizes the critical role libraries play in society as repositories of knowledge and culture. Without libraries, we would lack a connection to our past and the resources necessary to inform our future, highlighting the importance of access to books and information for the growth and development of individuals and communities.
In practice
During a speech at a local school, I quoted Bradbury to emphasize the importance of funding our community library.
I've written about 2,000 short stories; I've only published 300 and I feel I'm still learning. Any man who keeps working is not a failure. He may not be a great writer, but if he applies the old fashioned virtues of hard, constant labor, he'll eventually make some kind of career for himself as a writer. Ray Bradbury, 1967 interview (Doing the Math - that means for every story he sold, he wrote six "un-publishable" ones. Keep typing!)
I never went to college, so I went to the library.
There must be something in books, something we canβt imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You donβt stay for nothing.
I think the sun is a flower, That blooms for just one hour.
The first thing a writer should be is - excited. He should be a thing of fevers and enthusiasms. Without such vigor, he might as well be out picking peaches or digging ditches; God knows it'd be better for his health.
You can't try to do things; you simply must do them.
When you're a biographer, you want to explore the very things that your subject didn't care to talk about.
Mom was an academic, so the riches that she had to bestow were of the mind.
When I learned to sign and speak at the same time, the whole world opened up to me. That's the beauty of encouraging kids who are deaf to use whatever it takes to communicate.
There are only two kinds of books -- good books and the others. The good are winnowed from the bad through the democracy of time.
Read to your children all of the time_x000D_ Novels and nursery rhymes_x000D_ Autobiographies, even the newspaper_x000D_ It doesn't mater; it's quality time_x000D_ Because once upon a time _x000D_ We grew up on stories in the voices in which they were told _x000D_ We need words to hold us and the world to behold us _x000D_ For us to truly know our souls
If nobody talks about books, if they are not discussed or somehow contended with, literature ceases to be a conversation, ceases to be dynamic. Most of all, it ceases to be intimate. It degenerates into a monologue or a mutter. An unreviewed book is a struck bell that gives no resonance. Without reviews, literature would be oddly mute in spite of all those words on all those pages of all those books. Reviewing makes of reading a participant sport, not a spectator sport.
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