Don Marquis came down after a month on the wagon, ambled over to the bar, and announced, 'I've conquered that goddamn willpower of mine. Gimme a double Scotch.

A library is many things. It's a place to go, to get in out of the rain. It's a place to go if you want to sit and think. But particularly it is a place where books live, and where you can get in touch with other people, and other thoughts, through books. If you want to find out about something, the information is in the reference books---the dictionaries, the encyclopedias, the atlases. If you like to be told a story, the library is the place to go.

The world is full of people who have never, since childhood, met an open doorway with an open mind.

New York is to the nation what the white church spire is to the village - the visible symbol of aspiration and faith, the white plume saying the way is up!

I am still encouraged to go on. I wouldn't know where else to go.

The sea answers all questions, and always in the same way; for when you read in the papers the interminable discussions and the bickering and the prognostications and the turmoil, the disagreements and the fateful decisions and agreements and the plans and the programs and the threats and the counter threats, then you close your eyes and the sea dispatches one more big roller in the unbroken line since the beginning of the world and it combs and breaks and returns foaming and saying: "So soon?" E. B. White "On A Florida Key

Writers do not merely reflect and interpret life, they inform and shape life.