Lawrence Clark Powell Quotes

#1. We are the children of a technological age. We have found streamlined ways of doing much of our routine work. Printing is no longer the only way of reproducing books. Reading them, however, has not changed.

Lawrence Clark Powell

#2. Reading books is good,
Rereading good books is better.

Lawrence Clark Powell

#3. Books are islands in the ocean of time. They are also oases in the deserts of time.

Lawrence Clark Powell

#4. Unless their use by readers bring them to life, books are indeed dead things.

Lawrence Clark Powell

#5. The good writer, the great writer, has what I have called the three S's: the power to see, to sense, and to say. That is, he is perceptive, he is feeling, and he has the power to express in language what he observes and reacts to.

Lawrence Clark Powell

#6. Books themselves need no defense. Their spokesmen come and go, their readers live and die, they remain constant.

Lawrence Clark Powell

#7. This is the gift all writers seek-to write language that incandesces yet does not melt.

Lawrence Clark Powell

#8. I have always been reconciled to the fact that I was born a bibliomaniac, never have I sought a cure, and my dearest friends have been drawn from those likewise suffering from book madness.

Lawrence Clark Powell

#9. Believers and doers are what we need - faithful librarians who are humble in the presence of books ... To be in a library is one of the purest of all experiences. This awareness of library's unique, even sacred nature, is what should be instilled in our neophites.

Lawrence Clark Powell

#10. Write to be understood, speak to be heard, read to grow.

Lawrence Clark Powell

#11. To achieve lasting literature, fictional or factual, a writer needs perceptive vision, absorptive capacity, and creative strength.

Lawrence Clark Powell

#12. What makes a book great, a so-called classic, it its quality of always being modern, of its author, though he be long dead, continuing to speak to each new generation.

Lawrence Clark Powell

#13. No university in the world has ever risen to greatness without a correspondingly great library ... When this is no longer true, then will our civilization have come to an end.

Lawrence Clark Powell