David Gerrold Quotes

What if there was a library which held every book? Not every book on sale, or every important book, or even every book in English, but simply every book - a key part of our planet's cultural legacy.

When I think of the library of Alexandria and of the fact that, although it burnt down, people continue to sort the letters of the alphabet according to that tradition, then that makes certain expressions of modernity, even of interventions on the textual level, possible.

White people use their literature to maintain culture. That's why you find references to Milton and Spencer and Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky in contemporary novels.

Language also encodes our past. We want to know who we are. To know who we are, we have to know who we used to be. Consequently, our literature, written in the past, anchors us in that past.

My grandfather had a proper bookcase of egghead books, and he gave them to me in alphabetical order. So we moved from Aeschylus to the Brontas, and I can still remember the great relief of going from the dipus cycle to Jane Eyre.

I think there's something really painful about your identity being entirely composed of ghosts. For me, I didn't want to be this kid whose Dominicanness was something caught utterly in the past, is an abstraction, the thing that I write about. Instead I wanted it to be, first and foremost, a thing that I lived.

It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.

Writers are historians, too. It is in literature that the greater truths about a people and their past are found.

I was absolutely delighted that those shows have been preserved.

Literature becomes the living memory of a nation.

One has a sort of spiritual obligation to go back to the source material of the literature, to make contact with one of the seminal plays of the modern theater.

What is true for book publishing is true for civilization: the books that survive the test of time are humanity's backlist, our collective memory.

A great value of antiquity lies in the fact that its writings are the only ones that modern men still read with exactness.

This country, and the West Coast, especially, is bad at preserving any cultural legacy.

I know in this time of great technological advancement, the idea of reading a book seems almost anachronistic, but I think it's worth preserving.

The university's business is the conservation of useless knowledge; and what the university itself apparently fails to see is that this enterprise is not only noble but indispensable as well, that society can not exist unless it goes on.

With each new book, the march of our national history takes a step forward. When one is present at a book launch, one is bearing witness to the birth of a new body of ideas, to the coming into being of another testimony of history.

Our ancient historical monuments are national property and ought no longer to be left to the mercy of the many and variable ideas of ecclesiastical propriety that may at any time be prevalent among us

A nation’s literature is the expression of a nation's mind in writing and the concentration of intellect for the purpose of spreading itself abroad and multiplying its energy

Shakespeare is practically our only link with the classic and the past. The future of education has much to do with whether we will be able to cling to him or not.

Shakespeare and Co dedicates itself to a shared, heady and outdated ideal that is scarce in our protective and fearful age.

I want to contribute to the culture and keep great writers alive by telling the stories of their lives.

Thus, literature, together with language, preserves and protects a nation's soul.

I am very concerned about our national heritage, and I am very concerned that the films that I watched when I was young and the films that I watched throughout my life are preserved, so that my children can see them.

Librarians are not just gatekeepers to knowledge, they are what the American Indians used to call their special sages who preserved the oral legends of a tribe: dream keepers.