Category: Random thoughts

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An instrument of torture

And my final quote from Sophie Divry’s The Library of Unrequited Love, this time on the Dewey decimal classification:

What a perverse invention, an instrument of torture. … Stupid, anarchic, mega-moronic. The Dewey system is a secret code invented by the Axis of Evil that binds books and librarians together in order to scare the reader off. It’s terrifying, the Dewey system. Totally inhibiting. Everything goes into it, like a mincer. Your holidays, your house, your tastes, your furniture, just everything. There’s even a classification for sexuality – and plenty of different shelfmarks for all the complications. … I’m telling you, if no-one stops them, the people on the ground floor will end up putting a shelfmark on all of us ….

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Homeric battle

The library is the arena where every day the Homeric battle begins between books and readers. In this struggle, the librarians are the referees. … Either they’re cowards and take the side of the mountain of books, or they bravely help the worried reader.

Sophie Divry, The Library of Unrequited Love

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Sparks

Book and reader, if they meet up at the right moment in a person’s life, it can make sparks fly, set you alight, change your life.

Sophie Divry, The Library of Unrequited Love

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4,291

It’s like there’s a scale from 1 to 10, and you always would have sworn that someone or something mattered to you with a 10. But then you almost (or you actually do) lose her or him or it or them, and suddenly your heart is filled with a 17 or a 39 or a 4,291 kind of mattering. New capacities, ones you didn’t know were possible before, open up inside you.

Rob Bell, What We Talk about When We Talk about God

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The last of the human freedoms

Reflecting on his experiences in Auschwitz, Victor Frankl remembers that

the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread … offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

Victor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy