librarians

"For honour of the Lord God and Our Lady dear And many holy men by Augia's house revered, This book with loving care, attentive to command, Was made by Reginbert the scribe; in earnest hope That long it should endure, long serve his brethren's need. He prays you all, lest vain his labour die, In Heaven's most gracious Name to offer it to none Outside our walls; save should the seeker pledge his word Our property in sound condition to return. Good friend, ponder this well: a writer's task is hard; Take, open, read, harm not; finish, refold, !"

"Aux États-Unis la nature, comme la société, n'est pas toujours belle, mais elle est toujours grande."

"With untiring energy Allatius combined a vast erudition, which he brought to bear upon literary, historical, philosophical, and theological questions."

"Then, one April afternoon, Chris landed at the island, and by the first clean quick movement of tying up his boat made her his slave. I could imagine that it would be so. He was so wonderful when he was young; he possessed in great measure the loveliness of young men, which is like the loveliness of the spry foal or the sapling, but in him it was vexed into a serious and moving beauty by the inhabiting soul. […] [F]rom his eyes, which though grey were somehow dark with speculation, one perceived that he was distracted by participation in some spiritual drama. To see him was to desire intimacy with him so that one might intervene between this body which was formed for happiness, and this soul which cherished so deep a faith in tragedy."

"Wealdstone is not, in its way, a bad place; it lies in the lap of open country and at the end of every street rise the green hill of Harrow and the spires of Harrow School. But all the streets are long and red and freely articulated with railway arches, and factories spoil the skyline with red angular chimneys, and in front of the shops stand little women with backs ridged by cheap stays, who tapped their upper lips with their forefingers and made other feeble, doubtful gestures as though they wanted to buy something and knew that if they did they would have to starve some other appetite. When we asked them the way they turned to us faces sour with thrift. It was a town of people who could not do as they liked."

"As the car swung through the gates of Baldry Court she sat up and dried her eyes. She looked out at the strip of turf, so bright that one would think it wet, and lit here and there with snowdrops and scillas and crocuses, that runs between the drive and the tangle of silver birch and bramble and fern. There is no aesthetic reason for that border; the common outside looks lovelier where it fringes the road with dark gorse and rough amber grasses. Its use is purely philosophic; it proclaims that here we estimate only controlled beauty, that the wild will not have its way within our gates, that it must be made delicate and decorated into felicity. Surely she must see that this was no place for beauty that has been not mellowed but lacerated by time, that no one accustomed to live here could help wincing at such external dinginess as hers."

"Well, one sounded the bell that hung on a post, and presently Margaret in a white dress would come out of the porch and would walk to the stone steps down to the river. Invariably, as she passed the walnut tree that overhung the path, she would pick a leaf and crush it and sniff the sweet scent; and as she came near the steps she would shade her eyes and peer across the water. “She is a little near-sighted; you can’t imagine how sweet it makes her look.” (I did not say that I had seen her, for indeed this Margaret I had never seen.)"

"When she came back into the parlour again she was wearing that yellowish raincoat, that hat whose hearse plumes nodded over its sticky straw, that grey alpaca skirt. I first defensively clutched my hands. It would have been such agony to the finger tips to touch any part of her apparel. And then I thought of Chris, to whom a second before I had hoped to bring a serene comforter. I perceived clearly that that ecstatic woman lifting her eyes and her hands to the benediction of love was Margaret as she existed in eternity; but this was Margaret as she existed in time, as the fifteen years between Monkey Island and this damp day in Ladysmith Road had irreparably made her. Well, I had promised to bring her to him."

"She was then just a girl in white who lifted a white face or drooped a dull gold head. And as that she was nearer to him than at any other time. That he loved her, in this twilight which obscured all the physical details which he adored, seemed to him a guarantee that theirs was a changeless love which would persist if she were old or maimed or disfigured. He […] watched the white figure take the punt over the black waters, mount the grey steps and assume their greyness, become a green shade in the green darkness of the foliage-darkened lawn, and he exulted in that guarantee."

"Well, she was not so bad. Her body was long and round and shapely and with a noble squareness of the shoulders; her fair hair curled diffidently about a good brow; her grey eyes, though they were remote, as if anything worth looking at in her life had kept a long way off, were full of tenderness; and though she was slender there was something about her of the wholesome endearing heaviness of the draught-ox or the big trusted dog. Yet she was bad enough. She was repulsively furred with neglect and poverty, as even a good glove that has dropped down behind a bed in a hotel and has lain undisturbed for a day or two is repulsive when the chambermaid retrieves it from the dust and fluff."

"I think a lot of scholars don't realize how the information about the work that they've done is so tightly held and controlled by proprietary databases. Not even just the content of your papers, but just the information about it. There is no publicly accessible open source repository for all of it. Wikidata is definitely a step in the right direction. And this is something that's extremely important. This is this is why I like to I like to talk about Wikipedia and wiki projects as being like public media institutions. To contrasted this with, you know, all of the, the corporate and corporate entities that libraries and archives are beholden to. When I talk about Wikipedia with students, I think a lot of times that they immediately imagine that Wikipedia is a company like all the other companies and that's the only sort of model that they've ever considered. I think we really need to sort of sort of break through that line of thinking and the way that we do our work doesn't have to fall under the auspices of, entities like, like OCLC. I mean, not that they're not doing good work, but that, you know, that they we could create different kinds of more flexible and open models for sharing the work that we all do."

"Pietism produced some beneficial results. In the subjective bias of the whole movement, however, there lay from the beginning the danger of many abuses. It often degenerated into fanaticism, with alleged prophecies, visions, and mystical states."

"Deutschland, Deutschland über alles, Über alles in der Welt, Wenn es stets zu Schutz und Trutze Brüderlich zusammenhält. Von der Maas bis an die Memel, Von der Etsch bis an den Belt, Deutschland, Deutschland über alles, Über alles in der Welt!"

"Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit Für das deutsche Vaterland! Danach laßt uns alle streben Brüderlich mit Herz und Hand! Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit Sind des Glückes Unterpfand – Blüh' im Glanze dieses Glückes, Blühe, deutsches Vaterland!"

"Deutsche Frauen, deutsche Treue, Deutscher Wein und deutscher Sang."

"Nem leszek többe szerelmes ..."

"Uri nemzet eredete Deli, jeles, ép termete ..."

"Ha azt az erdőt le vághatnám Galambomat meg láthatnám."

"Híres főrend nemzetében, Nincsen hiba termetében ..."

"Egy kis tarka madár víg kedvében ..."

"My attention has been drawn to an article regarding my endorsement of a certain political party and its presidential candidate ahead of the 2023 general elections,” the statement reads."

"To identify, acquire, organize, preserve, provide and disseminate resources of enduring value that will support teaching, learning and research at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka."

"Hard work is the rule of the game. As a woman you need to work twice as hard in a male dominated position. She continued, keep your eye on the ball and reach out to people for mentoring bearing in mind that people are looking up to you."

"I am grateful to God for been able to clinch the position. I hope to make a change and do something different as the first female librarian and I believe that with God by my side, I will not disappoint people."

"I am currently a Professor in the department of Library and Information Science, University of Nigeria Nsukka.I was the University Librarian of same institution between 2014 to 2020.I have presented papers in several conferences around the globe.In addition, I have written papers in several peer-reviewed and well cited journals internationally and nationally.I am also a consultant to many organizations within and outside the country and a Chartered Librarian.My specialties are Academic Librarianship, ICTs in Librarianship, Bibliometrics, Audiovisual Librarianship and Gender Studies."

"The student who doesn't want to learn has come again. We sent her away, but she refused to go."

"It’s so long, but not goodbye."

"Mum was an intrepid traveller and together with dad, and sometimes alone, visited far flung places. Funlayo and I inveigled ourselves on to some of those trips. I am glad and thankful to God that in the last few decades of her life I also, was able to take her to new places."

"Inadequate funding and lack of commitment to library development by the National Universities Commission was responsible for the poor state of libraries in the universities."

"Through 10 per cent of budgetary allocation to each university was meant for library development, government sometimes failed to release such grants"

"Without consciously realising it my mum was my first female role model. Seeing her just get out there and doing it meant I never once thought of myself as a disadvantaged female. She gained her Ph.D in Literature in English after her first three children were born. She became a professor (one of the first five female professors in Nigeria) and reached lofty heights all of which I took for granted and thought was the norm; indeed, as I grew up and entered the world of employment it was a rude shock to realise that the reality was far different for many women. By then it was too late for me to think of myself as anything but able, unhampered by the little detail of being female. For that I am thankful."

"My earliest memories of mum were of me being a very clingy child and never wanting to leave her side. This usually resulted in a two-year old me bolting from playgroup and finding my way home to my stunned parents. They would sing, “Isa nsa ma tun de, a le ko lo ko le lo!” I would cry, but simply do it again. I also remember constantly pressing mum’s upper arm as a child, deriving much comfort from it. She always allowed me."

"My mother was strong-willed, but calm and patient. And I, well, I was just plain old stubborn and impatient to boot. There were some, uhm, memorable fights, but generally she was the calm to my storm."

"She was my greatest cheerleader, supporter and critic, especially after dad passed. I am grateful to God that she lived to see me elevated to the Inner Bar."

"My parents encouraged us to read, read, read. Books, Encyclopaedia, comics, magazines, you name it. We got our love of literature, poetry and history from them, especially mum. English Literature was one of my favourite subjects, as was History, no surprises. From Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night to The Iliad and The Odyssey to Soyinka’s The Man Died to Achebe’s No Longer at Ease/Things Fall Apart, to poetry The Journey of the Magi, to The Renaissance, she broke it down effortlessly for me."

"Mum was extremely generous and would constantly beg us, despite our protestations, to let her know if we needed anything even till she breathed her last. She lived life on her own terms. She did it her way. Mum, it’s so long, but not goodbye. You now belong to the ages… Requiescat in pace."

"If mum asked you to clean her bathroom, you were best advised to go over it with a fine toothcomb. Her eagle eyes would unfailingly spot that area that you’d carelessly – or perhaps lazily – overlooked and she’d make you clean it to perfection. I got my eye for detail from her. We would grumble under our breath and wonder why she was nit-picking. Today, I’m grateful."

"Mum was a disciplinarian though not in the physical sense – as to the latter at best she might use her slippers, but the truth was she was no dab hand and couldn’t beat anyone to save her life! We would usually just pretend to cry so she could let us go, whilst we ran off to have a good laugh."

"Growing up with mum was, well, rather interesting. We did so many house chores we could not but wonder why, given that we had domestic help. Sweeping, scrubbing, dusting, kitchen chores, polishing the wooden stairs with a coconut husk, you name it. As I grew into adulthood it all made perfect sense. And I’m very grateful for that training."

"Her stories plunge the reader directly into an unmediated world of subjective feeling. Usually the subjects of her novels and stories are young women facing the problems of growing up and contending with romantic attachments. In a later novel, With Her on Her Way Home (1991), she deals with the problems of growing old. Kahana-Carmon's language is carefully shaped and unadorned, but possessing an idiosyncratic subtlety that makes translation difficult."

"I write when I cannot hold back any longer. Call it an attack, an ir­resistible impulse. In a way, my writing has almost been clandestine. There was a constant feeling of guilt, and a continuous tension between my duties at home and my literary aspirations."

"Amalia Kahana-Carmon is often described as the Israeli Virginia Woolf. Though she belongs to the age group of the Palmach generation of the fifties, she is normally classified as one of the “New Wave” writers on a par with A. B. Yehoshua and Amos Oz."

"Living in a world of flux, subjugated to the indecipherable laws of constant vicissitudes, our encounters cannot but be momentary flashes. The glamor cannot last because we change, the others change, circumstances change. So I wouldn’t call the end of a relationship a failure."

"I wrote about the hard way in which one learns the pain of the break between dream and reality. And you know, in the beginning I tended to write, for lack of a better term, in the “romantic” vein. I was trying to search for human nature through the external order of things. I wanted to touch human misery without getting my hands dirty, out of a peculiar fastidiousness. I think I changed tremendously in this sense. I am not as much of an outsider anymore. I am more capable now of observing the pain, and being part of it at the same time. I have learned to come to terms with the “concrete” and naked reality and not flinch from expressing it in a more direct fashion."

"Every human encounter is the external embodiment of an attraction between two magnetic fields. The encounter comes suddenly, unexpectedly. It is a moment of truth. It is a moment of revelation, as when the right ray of sun penetrates through the right window pane, and falls with the right slant on one picture in the museum. This is the painfully short moment which shows us just what the artist had in mind. It happened to me once. I walked into a bookstore in Jerusalem. I opened one book after another, when suddenly I found myself reading something breathlessly. It was a book of poems by Pinhas Sadeh. There was a flash, I was touched by something powerful. For some reason, I could not purchase the book right away. A while later, back in Tel Aviv, I went to buy the book. When I opened it this time it was—difficult. The angle had changed. The ray of light passed me by. There was no illumination. The same happens with human encounters. We meet someone, and suddenly we are capable of being ourselves, just like we were supposed to be—ourselves without hiding, without pretending, with no pretexts. We are each a magnetic field. And each attraction, limited as it may appear to be, is a cosmic happening—it occurs within the broader pattern of things, within the endlessly complex structure which underlies our lives."

"After all, what are we trying to find in a book ? Ourselves. A good book offers you yourself in a more articulate way. Reading is actually plunging into one’s own identity and, one hopes, emerging stronger than before. You see, unconsciously, we are seeking to find an affirmation to our own world -perception and set of values. Since these change as we grow up and develop, our response to books changes as well. I don’t believe there is an objective yardstick by which a book may be evaluated. The “science” of literary criticism is an illusion—it is based on subjective impressions, and no one feels the sting more strongly than I, being a critic myself. The only thing I hope to do in my books, is to open up the reader to a new awareness. There is no logical or speculative message I intend to transmit. The “message” belongs to the realm of intuition, imagination and emotional perception. If I manage to make a reader sensitive to that special awareness which has inspired me to write, I consider myself a lucky writer."

"(What does the title of the story, “There, The Newsroom” mean?) A. K. -C. The essential news, the news which matters, is not in the newsroom but in the opposite direction. The things which shape our lives are not projected on the television screen."

"Every story is a breakthrough. Every story is catching a glimpse of some vast, infinite pattern which gives meaning to our lives. Every story is an acceptance, a realization that the all-encompassing pattern is there for a purpose. But the unconscious attempt to disguise the pattern is infinite, so every story comes as a surprise."

"Style is a part and parcel of the expression. I never “think out” devices. The device is a reflection of my psychic structure. It’s like my own voice. Part of it is the sound, the other part—my intonation."

"A writer is a person who at a certain point in his life has found out that he is bothered by something which those around him seem to take in their stride. He finds out that here the usual modes of talk will not do, and he turns to investigate it the lonely way—on paper. It is doubtful if he is to find a solution to those pestering questions, but giving shape to his probings is itself a kind of solace. And then, something strange happens. The paper gets hold of him. It stimulates him, it becomes a meaning to itself. This person has passed a thin line into a new, a different world, to stay there forever. Forever, because not to obey this call now is tantamount to desertion, or still worse, to exile."