Frances Clarke Sayers famous quotes

A love of reading encompasses the whole of life: information, knowledge, insight and understanding, pleasure; the power to think, to select, to act, to create - all of these are inherent in a love of reading.
-- Frances Clarke Sayers

#Book #Reading #Thinking

The library profession is ... a profession that is informed, illuminated, radiated by a fierce and beautiful love of books. A love so overwhelming that it engulfs community after community and makes the culture of our time distinctive, individual, creative and truly of the spirit.
-- Frances Clarke Sayers

#Beautiful #Book #Creative

I think the number of books published by Mr. Disney has nothing to do with whether or not he is bringing literature to children. That judgment has got to be based on quality rather than quantity. It's the same old problem that continually plagues American culture. I would rather have children playing their own games out of doors in the sunlight than getting the misrepresentation of literature as given by Walt Disney.
-- Frances Clarke Sayers

#Children #Book #Thinking

Walt Disney has never addressed himself to children once in his life - never. The material of his cartoons is made to reach an adult audience. This is the whole trouble. Everything is made to reach everyone, and in order to reach everyone, he must introduce the Hollywood touch. Every illustration of a girl in Disney's books looks like the Hollywood queen and every picture of the hero looks like a badly drawn Cary Grant. Obvious symbols of an adult world.
-- Frances Clarke Sayers

#Girl #Children #Book

There is no reason why good books should be lowered or lessened being rewritten to meet the demands of people who are not ready or interested enough to make the effort to read.
-- Frances Clarke Sayers

#Book #People #Effort

I feel that anybody who addresses himself to children has a responsibility, and that responsibility is to make available to children the very best that has ever been produced and to sustain the distinction of what has been produced. Everybody in the popular entertainment field or in the popular arts has a responsibility.
-- Frances Clarke Sayers

#Art #Children #Responsibility

I've heard people ask, What's so sacred about a classic books that you can't change it for the modern child? Nothing is sacred about a classic. What makes a classic is the life that has accrued to it from generation after generation of children. Children give life to these books. Some books which you could hardly bear to read are, for children, classic.
-- Frances Clarke Sayers

#Children #Book #Giving

We're caught in the pace of modern living - this emphasis on the "quick take," on the magazine that says it will take you eight minutes to read an article. It seems to me that here is a tendency that ought to be denied in part. Certain children do read in the past; they love the old language; they love the sound of words. I don't think it's good enough to say something is better because is it updated and modern.
-- Frances Clarke Sayers

#Children #Thinking #Past

If everything is made so obvious that it asks nothing of the readers, then after a while, their ability to respond is atrophied. And they grow up as young people unable to take anything from a printed page, or they become bored because they haven't discovered the nuances, the differences of opinion, the differences of approach between one author and another. Children can be trusted to skip what they don't like in a book. That's perfectly all right. But to have it all reduced to the supposedly twelve-year-old mind of the adult public is what I object to.
-- Frances Clarke Sayers

#Children #Growing Up #Book

An American has invented a remote control that will turn off any telly within a 20ft radius. What a marvellous device! What a splendid invention! What a really helpful and improving way of devoting your time to building something that turns off culture. Next week, I'm instigating Burn a Book Week, to encourage even more conversation. I've come up with a fantastic little device which I'll call a box of matches.

The Old Testament is responsible for more atheism, agnosticism, disbelief - call it what you will - than any book ever written; it has emptied more churches than all the counterattractions of cinema, motor bicycle and golf course.

One has to ascertain the right path for his activities by following in the footsteps of great saintly persons and books of knowledge under the guidance of a spiritual master.

The selection of a book-plate is such a serious matter.

In very clear and available language, this book details how to recognize the inner critic and how to deal effectively with it. Byron Brown's presentation is useful for any individual who wishes to be free from the inner suffering and coercion of this ancient foe of our humanity, but it is specifically directed to those interested and engaged in the inner journey toward realization and enlightenment.

Get books, sit yourself down anywhere, and go to reading them yourself.

If you wish to be a lawyer, attach no consequence to the place you are in, or the person you are with; but get books, sit down anywhere, and go to reading for yourself. That will make a lawyer of you quicker than any other way.

Leafing through Forbes or Fortune [magazine]s is like reading the operating manual of a strangely sanctimonious pirate ship

Goodbye, my almost lover. Goodbye, my hopeless dream. I'm trying not to think about you, can't you just let me be? So long, my luckless romance, my back is turned on you. Should've known you'd bring me heartache. Almost lovers always do.

Indo-European peoples and Semitic peoples are today still completely different... Jews almost everywhere form a special society... Muslims (the Semitic spirit is today represented mainly by Islam) and the Europeans stand face to face like two beings of different species, having nothing common in the way of thinking and feeling...