The Culture Of Drink Endures Because It

What Libraries Give You Is All Three Tenses - The Past Tense - The Present Tense In Which We Live And The Future That We Can Only Imagine. These Places Have Teachers Who Are Living And Dead And We Are Lucky To Have Them. If I Sit Here And Read Aristotle, He Is Speaking To Me Across A Thousand Years - More Than A Thousand Years. That Sense That I Am In The Company Of The Great Greatest People Who Ever Lived Is A Humbling Experience But A Liberating Experience.

The Library Is A Place Where Most Of The Things I Came To Value As An Adult Had Their Beginnings.

There Is Something Elegantly Sinister About The Rolling Stones. They Sit Before You At A Press Conference Like Five Unfolding Switchblades; Their Faces Set In Rehearsed Snarls; Their Hair Studiously Unkempt And Matted; Their Clothes Part Of Some Private Conceit; And The Way They Walk And Talk And The Songs They Sing All Become Part Of Some Long Mean Reach For The Jugular.

My Ambition Was To Embrace Those General Qualities That Ernest Hemingway, A Former Newspaperman, Once Said Should Be Present In All Good Books: 'the Good And The Bad, The Ecstasy, The Remorse And Sorrow, The People And The Places And How The Weather Was.'

The Culture Of Drink Endures Because It Offers So Many Rewards: Confidence For The Shy, Clarity For The Uncertain, Solace To The Wounded And Lonely, And Above All, The Elusive Promises Of Friendship And Love.