A Quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson
In a library we are surrounded by many hundreds of dear friends, but they are imprisoned by an enchanter in these paper and leathern boxes.
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I went to work at the library. I know that sounds crazy but I didn't know where else to go. Besides, at the library I was constantly surrounded by people. And I loved my job, surrounded by so many books, so many lives, so much of the past.
I don't know if you know it, J.B., but you're the sort of fellow who causes hundreds to fall under suspicion when he's found stabbed in his library with a paper-knife of Oriental design.
She closed the book and put her cheek against it. There was still an odor of a library on it, of dust, leather, binding glue, and old paper, one book carrying the smell of hundreds.
If you were to come in to my house, I have archived every fan letter I've ever been given, boxes and boxes and boxes and boxes of them.
Paris is where my family are, but it's not really home now because I have dear friends in London and dear friends in New York.
I have sane friends, solvent friends, foodie friends, and friends who can take time off in the week, but I don't know one single person who ticks all those boxes.
Now, the term 'friend' is a little loose. People mock the 'friending' on social media, and say, 'Gosh, no one could have 300 friends!' Well, there are all kinds of friends. Those kinds of 'friends,' and work friends, and childhood friends, and dear friends, and neighborhood friends, and we-walk-our-dogs-at-the-same-time friends, etc.
At the end of their relationship she asked if they could still remain friends. His face stayed expressionless until he said "No. Because we put friends in boxes. You see them once in a while, or even a lot, but still they have their box in your life, their specific place. Their *category.* That's one of the great things about being someone's love-- you have no box in their life because you're part of all their boxes. You're their friend, their lover, their confidante-- all those things. I don't want to be put in one of your boxes and I don't want to shrink you to fit into one of mine.
A major writer combines these three - storyteller, teacher, enchanter - but it is the enchanter in him that predominates and makes him a major writer.
I think that one of the visions that is closest to reality is the cardboard city in the subway station in Tokyo, which is based very closely on a series of documentary photographs of people living like that and of the contents of the boxes. Those are quite haunting because Tokyo homeless people reiterate the whole nature of living in Tokyo in these cardboard boxes, they're only slightly smaller than Tokyo apartments, and they have almost as many consumer goods. It's a nightmare of boxes within boxes.
Come indoors then, and open the books on your library shelves. For you have a library and a good one. A working library, a living library; a library where nothing is chained down and nothing is locked up; a library where the songs of the singers rise naturally from the lives of the livers.
When you come up with a theory, you fall in love with the beauty the simplicity and elegance of it. But then you have to get a sheet of paper and pencil and crack out all the details. Hundreds and hundreds of pages. Because you have to prove it.
Surrounded by all the members of my dear family, enjoying the affection of numerous friends, who have never abandoned me, and possessing a sufficient share of all that contributes to make life agreeable, I lift my grateful eyes towards the Supreme Being and feel that I am happy.
No longer will you be a weird Robinson Crusoe, imprisoned on an island of night surrounded by oceans of death.
Desktop computers - boxes inside boxes - began appearing in those cubicles in the mid-eighties, electrical cords curling on the floor like so many ropes.
Do you see that kitten chasing so prettily her own tail? If you could look with her eyes, you might see her surrounded with hundreds of figures performing complex dramas, with tragic and comic issues, long conversations, many characters, many ups and downs of fate.
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