Matthew Battles > Quotes

“Andras Riedlmayer described a colleague who survived the siege of Sarajevo. In the winter, the scholar and his wife ran out of firewood, and so began to burn their books for heat and cooking. 'This forces one to think critically,' Riedlmayer remembered his friend saying. 'One must prioritize. First you burn old college textbooks, which you haven't read in thirty years. Then there are the duplicates. But eventually, you're forced to make tougher choices. Who burns today: Dostoevsky or Proust?' I asked Riedlmayer if his friend had any books left when the war was over. 'Oh yes,' he replied, his face lit by a flickering smile. 'He still had many books. Sometimes, he told me, you look at the books and just choose to go hungry.”
― Matthew Battles

“Roger Bacon held that three classes of substance were capable of magic: the herbal, the mineral, and the verbal. With their leaves of fiber, their inks of copperas and soot, and their words, books are an amalgam of the three.”
― Matthew Battles, Library: An Unquiet History

“In the ideal public library, we are all readers of the “middling sort.” Reading whatever we will, we fulfill a public function, preserving the sacrosanct space of inner thought that is our birthright. Assaults on that birthright in the forms of legislation, surveillance, and censorship ultimately are precisely as dangerous as our acquiescence in them.”
― Matthew Battles, Library: An Unquiet History

“What we face is not a loss of books but the loss of a world. As in Alexandria after Aristotle’s time, or the universities and monasteries of the early Renaissance, or the cluttered-up research libraries of the nineteenth century, the Word shifts again in its modes, tending more and more to dwell in pixels and bits instead of paper and ink. It seems to disappear thereby, as it must have for the ancient Peripatetics, who considered writing a spectral shibboleth of living speech; or the princely collectors of manuscripts in the Renaissance, who saw the newly recovered world of antiquity endangered by the brute force of the press; or the lovers of handmade books in the early nineteenth century, to whom the penny dreadful represented the final dilution of the power of literature. And yet, the very fact that the library has endured these cycles seems to offer hope. In its custody of books and the words they contain, the library has confronted and tamed technology, the forces of change, and the power of princes time and again.”
― Matthew Battles, Library: An Unquiet History

“The middle ages did not care much for alphabetical order, because they were committed to rational order. To the medieval mind, the universe [is] a harmonious whole whose parts are related to one another. It was the responsibility of the author or scholar to discern these rational relationships -- of hierarchy, or of chronology, or of similarities and differences, and so forth.”
― Matthew Battles, Library: An Unquiet History

“Socrates is talking not about memory in general, nor especially the art of mnemonics practiced by masters of memory. In Socrates’s reckoning, she writes, the ancient Egyptians possessed memory of the deepest kind: memory of the Ideas—the living universal realities of which all things, passions, sensations, and sundry states of affairs are but passing shadows. Memory in this view is no apparatus for the collation and curation of trivia but the imperishable recollection of the knowledge we possessed before we are born—the foundation of knowledge itself. “A Platonic memory,” Yates concludes, “would have to be organised, not in the trivial manner of . . . mnemotechnics, but in relation to the realities.” Memory in the Platonic definition is not about storage but revelation.”
― Matthew Battles, Palimpsest: A History of the Written Word

“Now he would prowl the stacks of the library at night, pulling books out of a thousand shelves and reading them like a madman. The thought of these vast stacks of books would drive him mad: the more he read, the less he seemed to know—the greater the number of the books he read, the greater the immense uncountable number of those which he could never read would seem to be.... He read insanely, by the hundreds, the thousands, the ten thousands. . . . [T]he thought that other books were waiting for him tore at his heart forever. He pictured himself as tearing the entrails from a book as from a fowl.”
― Matthew Battles, Library: An Unquiet History

“The bibliographer in the digital age returns to the revelatory practice of her medieval forebears. Librarians, like those scribes of the Middle Ages, do not merely keep and classify texts; they create them, in the form of online finding aids, CD-ROM concordances, and other electronic texts, not to mention paper study guides and published bibliographies.”
― Matthew Battles, Library: An Unquiet History

“explanation of the difference between a language and a dialect:”
― Matthew Battles, Palimpsest: A History of the Written Word

“But the library - especially one so vast - is no mere cabinet of curiosities; it's a world, complete and uncompleteable, and it is filled with secrets.”
― Matthew Battles, Library: An Unquiet History

“Topologically, a P and a q are equivalent, as are a coffee mug and a doughnut.”
― Matthew Battles, Palimpsest: A History of the Written Word

“The son of London laborers, Smith was an engraver who taught himself to read Assyrian cuneiform during lunch hours in the British Museum.”
― Matthew Battles, Palimpsest: A History of the Written Word

“a language, he said, is a dialect with an army and a navy.”
― Matthew Battles, Palimpsest: A History of the Written Word