What is more important in a library than anything else – than everything else – is the fact that it exists. – Archibald MacLeish, "The Premise of Meaning," American Scholar, 5 June 1
Libraries are reservoirs of strength, grace and wit, reminders of order, calm and continuity, lakes of mental energy, neither warm nor cold, light nor dark…. In any library in the world, I am at home, unselfconscious, still and absorbed. – Germaine Greer
I wrote some bad poetry that I published in North African journals, but even as I withdrew into this reading, I also led the life of a kind of young hooligan. – Jacques Derrida
