Tag: Simple Sunday

Book Dragon

Simple Sunday- Libraries

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*Dedicated to K2 and my favorite childhood librarian who let me check out all the books.

“When I read about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that American society has found one more way to destroy itself.”-Isaac Asimov

“A library implies an act of faith.”-Victor Hugo


“Cutting libraries during a recession is like cutting hospitals during a plague.”-Eleanor Crumblehulme 

“The only thing that you absolutely have to know, is the location of the library.”-Albert Einstein 

“Children have to have access to books, and a lot of children can’t go to a store and buy a book. We need not only our public libraries to be funded properly and staffed properly, but our school libraries. Many children can’t get to a public library, and the only library they have is a school library.”- Katherine Paterson


“Bad libraries build collections, good libraries build services, great libraries build communities.”-R. David Lankes 

“I’m of a fearsome mind to throw my arms around every living librarian who crosses my path, on behalf of the souls they never knew they saved.”-Barbara Kingsolver

Simple Sundays

Simple Sunday- Explore!

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“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”- T.S. Eliot

“I like writers who can show me worlds I know nothing about, but my favorites are those who create characters or worlds which feel realistic and familiar to me, or who can make me feel inspired.”-Malala Yousafzai

“If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”-C. S. Lewis

“Kids should be allowed to break stuff more often. That’s a consequence of exploration. Exploration is what you do when you don’t know what you’re doing.”-Neil deGrasse Tyson

“The drills we do, where you’re telling kids to memorize things, don’t actually work. What works is engaging them and letting them do things and discover things.”-Mae Jemison

“Successful creative adults seem to combine the wide-ranging exploration and openness we see in children with the focus and discipline we see in adults.”-Alison Gopnik

Book Dragon · Simple Sundays

Simple Sunday- Read Banned Books

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“All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently, the first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.” ― George Bernard Shaw, Mrs. Warren’s Profession

“The burning of a book is a sad, sad sight, for even though a book is nothing but ink and paper, it feels as if the ideas contained in the book are disappearing as the pages turn to ashes and the cover and binding–which is the term for the stitching and glue that holds the pages together–blacken and curl as the flames do their wicked work. When someone is burning a book, they are showing utter contempt for all of the thinking that produced its ideas, all of the labor that went into its words and sentences, and all of the trouble that befell the author…” ― Lemony Snicket, The Penultimate Peril

“Let children read whatever they want and then talk about it with them. If parents and kids can talk together, we won’t have as much censorship because we won’t have as much fear.” ― Judy Blume

. “What I tell kids is, Don’t get mad, get even. Don’t spend time waving signs or carrying petitions around the neighborhood. Instead, run, don’t walk, to the nearest nonschool library or to the local bookstore and get whatever it was that they banned. Read whatever they’re trying to keep out of your eyes and your brain, because that’s exactly what you need to know.” ―Stephen King

“A dangerous book will always be in danger from those it threatens with the demand that they question their assumptions. They’d rather hang on to the assumptions and ban the book.” ―Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination

“You know what they say: When people start burning books they’ll soon burn human beings.”
— Cornelia Funke

“Submitting to censorship is to enter the seductive world of ‘The Giver’: the world where there are no bad words and no bad deeds. But it is also the world where choice has been taken away and reality distorted. And that is the most dangerous world of all.”
— Lois Lowry

Life Posts · Simple Sundays

Simple Sunday- Voting

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“To me, it was shocking that a government of men could look with such extreme contempt on a movement that was asking nothing except such a simple little thing as the right to vote.”-Alice Paul

“If people don’t vote, everything stays the same. You can protest until the sky turns yellow or the moon turns blue, and it’s not going to change anything if you don’t vote.”-Dolores Huerta

“Do not think your single vote does not matter much. The rain that refreshes the parched ground is made up of single drops.”
― Kate Sheppard

“The vote is the emblem of your equality, women of America, the guaranty of your liberty. That vote of yours has cost millions of dollars and the lives of thousands of women. Women have suffered agony of soul which you never can comprehend, that you and your daughters might inherit political freedom. That vote has been costly. Prize it! The vote is a power, a weapon of offense and defense, a prayer. Use it intelligently, conscientiously, prayerfully. Progress is calling to you to make no pause. Act!”― Carrie Catt

“That we have the vote means nothing. That we use it in the right way means everything.”― Lou Henry Hoover

Simple Sundays

Simple Sunday- Government

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“We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.”-Ayn Rand

“The offhand decision of some commonplace mind high in office at a critical moment influences the course of events for a hundred years.”-Thomas Hardy

“It was once said that the moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.”-Hubert H. Humphrey

“I stand for all those who feel that the government no longer understands the individual and no longer respects individual rights.”-Harvey Milk

“The Supreme Court, of course, has the responsibility of ensuring that our government never oversteps its proper bounds or violates the rights of individuals. But the Court must also recognize the limits on itself and respect the choices made by the American people.”-Elena Kagan

Simple Sundays

Simple Sunday- Appreciation

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“Time you enjoy wasting, was not wasted.” ~ John Lennon

“There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.” ~ Edith Wharton

“Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend.” ~ Melody Beattie

“Commonplaces never become tiresome. It is we who become tired when we cease to be curious and appreciative.” ~ Norman Rockwell

“The more one does and sees and feels, the more one is able to do, and the more genuine may be one’s appreciation of fundamental things like home, and love, and understanding companionship.” ~ Amelia Earhart

Simple Sundays

Simple Sunday- Words

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“I know nothing in the world that has as much power as a word. Sometimes I write one, and I look at it, until it begins to shine.”
― Emily Dickinson

“Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, ‘It might have been.”
― John Greenleaf Whittier

“Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly – they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“Words are like eggs dropped from great heights; you can no more call them back than ignore the mess they leave when they fall.”
― Jodi Picoult, Salem Falls

“I’ve developed a great reputation for wisdom by ordering more books than I ever had time to read, and reading more books, by far, than I learned anything useful from, except, of course, that some very tedious gentlemen have written books.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

Simple Sundays

Simple Sunday- Summer Reading

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“Come with me,’ Mom says.
To the library.
Books and summertime
go together.”
― Lisa Schroeder, I Heart You, You Haunt Me

“One benefit of Summer was that each day we had more light to read by.”
― Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle

“The library in summer is the most wonderful thing because there you get books on any subject and read them each for only as long as they hold your interest, abandoning any that don’t, halfway or a quarter of the way through if you like, and store up all that knowledge in the happy corners of your mind for your own self and not to show off how much you know or spit it back at your teacher on a test paper.”
― Polly Horvath, My One Hundred Adventures

“The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night,

Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.”
― Wallace Stevens

“But usually, I watched Linda read. I couldn’t believe she’d read so much in summer! Sometimes she laughed, reading her book, and one time she even cried. I didn’t know how anyone could make such a big deal about books.”― Alex Flinn, Beastly

Book Dragon · Simple Sundays

Simple Sunday- Fantasy

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“Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope, and that enables you to laugh at life’s realities.”-Dr. Seuss

“One of the best things about folklore and fairy tales is that the best fantasy is what you find right around the corner, in this world. That’s where the old stuff came from.”-Terri Windling

“The gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge.”-Albert Einstein

“Fantasy is an exercise bicycle for the mind. It might not take you anywhere, but it tones up the muscles that can. Of course, I could be wrong.”-Terry Pratchett

“The best fantasy does not offer an answer to our lives, it is an offering that acknowledges enough of the truth to resonate and add to the understanding about the human condition.”-Isobelle Carmody

Adventures · Life Posts · Simple Sundays

Simple Sunday- Love and Weirdness

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“We’re all a little weird. And life is a little weird. And when we find someone whos weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall into mutually satisfying weirdness- and call it love- true love.” ― Robert Fulghum, True Love

It’s slightly ridiculous to think that 12 years and a day ago, the Husband and I decided that we matched each other’s weirdness and decided to call it love. Since then we’ve gone through happy times, sad times, ridiculously goofy times, and above all, together times! Happy Anniversary and many more adventures to come to us!