#libraryoftheday

LOD. This is a home library in Croatia. I'll withhold the owner's name, because I suspect the outrage is about to fly. The only explanation of which up I can think is that the owner is trying to make the pattern of the book spines match the pattern of the floor boards. What do you think of this home library?

"Everything is change; and you cannot step twice into the same river." —Mary Renault, English-born South African writer, 4 September 1905—13 December 1983.

"I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of the hunger of life that gnaws in us all, to keep alive in our hearts a sense of the inexpressibly human." —Richard Wright, 4 September 1908—28 November 1960.

"Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books…" —Ibid.

"Words are like spices. Too many is worse than too few." —Joan Aiken, English writer, 4 September 1924—4 January 2004.

"A children’s book is not something that can be dashed off to order – children have huge needs…which reading will help to fill. A good children’s writer may be particularly well equipped to do this…as a kind of lunatic or poet…they are the sensitive points in a civilisation." —Ibid.

"All great characters, great icons, in literature are a bit of a riddle, and that’s the reason we go back to them over and over." —David Lagercrantz, Swedish journalist, born 4 September 1962.

LOD. Julia Wilson in Australia proves a home library doesn't have to be enormous to be wonderful. What a swell place to read.

"The flag of the United States be thirteen alternate stripes red and white [and] the Union be thirteen stars, white in a blue field, representing a new Constellation.” —American Continental Congress, determining the American flag, first taken into battle 3 September 1777, and which, in it's original configuration with a circle of 13 stars is today branded a hate symbol by the Dominion.

"Write to be understood, speak to be heard, read to grow." —Lawrence Clark Powell, librarian and writer, 3 September 1906—14 March 2001.

"I can speak of my own criterion for judging whether or not a book is good or bad. I ask of it a single question, From how deep and true an impulse did it spring? Was it written merely to shock? Only to make money? Or was it written to create something more perfect and more lasting than the life experience from which it came?" —Ibid.

"No university in the world has ever risen to greatness without a correspondingly great library." —Ibid.

"So now we’re being governed by a whole lot of people who are either weak and foolish, or cynical liars. Or a little of each." —Alison Lurie, Pulitzer winning author, 3 September 1926—3 December 2020.

"Truly successful decision making relies on a balance between deliberate and instinctive thinking." —Malcolm Gladwell, born 3 September 1963.

"Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing you do that makes you good." —Ibid.

"Moments are history. If you have enough of them, they become a story." —Adriana Trigiani, born 3 September 1969.

"The present changes the past. Looking back you do not find what you left behind." —Kiran Desai, Indian author, born 3 September 1971.

"One man caught on a barbed wire fence One man he resist One man washed up on an empty beach One man betrayed with a kiss In the name of love What more in the name of love?" —U2, from "Pride (In the Name of Love) first released as a single, 3 September 1984.