A Quote by Harry Allen Overstreet
If minds are truly alive they will seek out books, for books are the human race recounting its memorable experiences, confronting its problems, searching for solutions, drawing the blueprints of it futures.
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All my life, books have felt alive; some more so than people, or rather, some people. Alive - this has to do with me, I know, and not the books - in a way that some people aren't. Alive as teachers, alive as minds, alive as imaginative triggers.
My university degree is in art and, yes, I do a lot of drawing for all my books. I have a big drafting table set up in a spare bedroom and I cover it with maps and house plans and sketches that I use in the books. Also, I truly love architecture, so that plays a big part in all my books.
As always, a lot of bad books will be published. Some good books will be published, and you have to seek them out.
I am a product of endless books. My father bought all the books he read and never got rid of any of them. There were books in the study, books in the drawing room, books in the cloakroom, books (two deep) in the great bookcase on the landing, books in a bedroom, books piled as high as my shoulder in the cistern attic...In the seemingly endless rainy afternoons I took volume after volume from the shelves. I had always the same certainty of finding a book that was new to me as a man who walks into a field has of finding a new blade of grass.
I felt him there with me. The real David. My David. David, you are still here. Alive. Alive in me.Alive in the galaxy.Alive in the stars.Alive in the sky.Alive in the sea.Alive in the palm trees.Alive in feathers.Alive in birds.Alive in the mountains.Alive in the coyotes.Alive in books.Alive in sound.Alive in mom.Alive in dad.Alive in Bobby.Alive in me.Alive in soil.Alive in branches.Alive in fossils.Alive in tongues.Alive in eyes.Alive in cries.Alive in bodies.Alive in past, present and future. Alive forever.
I'm not really into comfort books. There are too many of those as it is. Just sort of narcotic books, like my grandmother used to read. They have value like Paxil has value, but there's plenty of them in the world already. There's a shortage of confronting, stimulating, exciting books.
The current publishing scene is extremely good for the big, popular books. They sell them brilliantly, market them and all that. It is not good for the little books. And really valuable books have been allowed to go out of print. In the old days, the publishers knew that these difficult books, the books that appeal only to a minority, were very productive in the long run. Because they're probably the books that will be read in the next generation.
It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with the superior minds, and these invaluable means of communication are in reach of all. In the best books, great men talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours. God be thanked for books. They are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages. Books are true levellers. They give to all, who faithfully use them, the society, the spiritual presence of the best and greatest of our race.
Electronic books are ideal for people who value the information contained in them, or who have vision problems, or who like to read on the subway, or who do not want other people to see how they are amusing themselves, or who have storage and clutter issues, but they are useless for people who are engaged in an intense, lifelong love affair with books. Books that we can touch; books that we can smell; books that we can depend on.
They will be given as gifts; books that are especially pretty or visual will be bought as hard copies; books that are collectible will continue to be collected; people with lots of bookshelves will keep stocking them; and anyone who likes to make notes in books will keep buying books with margins to fill.
In books I find the dead as if they were alive; in books I foresee things to come; in books warlike affairs are set forth; from books come forth the laws of peace. All things are corrupted and decay in time; Saturn ceases not to devour the children that he generates; all the glory of the world would be buried in oblivion, unless God had provided mortals with the remedy of books.
We all know that a book is not really a person. It isn’t a human being. But if you are a lover of books as books – as objects, that is – and ignore the human element in them – that is, their voices – you will be committing an error of the soul, because you will be an idolator, or else a fetishist.
There are a lot of people out there who will write books, in which everything turns out nicely and the bad guys lose, the good guys win, the boy gets the girl and they live happily ever after. There's a million books like that and if that's the comfort you're looking for, you should read those books and not my books because that's not the kind of book that I am interested in.
I have a low opinion of books; they are but piles of stones set up to show coming travelers where other minds have been, or at best signal smokes to call attention. No amount of word-making will ever make a single soul to know these mountains. As well seek to warm the naked and frostbitten by lectures on caloric and pictures of flame. One day's exposure to mountains is better than cartloads of books.
Mankind are creatures of books, as well as of other circumstances; and such they eternally remain,--proofs, that the race is a noble and believing race, and capable of whatever books can stimulate.
While confronting the problems of the present, I often find myself thinking back to the world of books as it was experienced by the Founding Fathers and the philosophers of the Enlightenment.
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