Jamie Smith

“Time is the river. We are the islands. Time washes around us and flows away and with it flow fragments of our lives. So, little by little, each island shrinks….But where, who can say, down the long stream of time, are our eroded days deposited?”
― Edwin Way Teale, Journey into Summer: A Naturalist's Record of a 19,000-Mile Journey through the North American Summer

“The first form of culture is agriculture. It is when man settles down to till the soil and lay up provisions for the uncertain future that he finds time and reason to be civilized.”
― Will Durant, Our Oriental Heritage

“To think wishfully, to rest in comforting illusion when scientific truth is conceivably within reach, is to desecrate both one’s self and the universe.”
― William Irvine, Apes, Angels and Victorians: The Story of Darwin, Huxley, and Evolution

“And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country