When he was seventy-four years old the Cretan novelist Nikos Kazantzakis began a book. He called it Report to Greco.. Kazantzakis thought of himself as a soldier reporting to his commanding officer on a mortal mission–his life..Well, there is only one Report to Greco, but no true book.. was ever anything else than a report.. A true book is a report upon the mystery of existence.. it speaks of the world, of our life in the world. Everything we have in the books on which our libraries are founded– Euclid's figures, Leonardo's notes, Newton's explanations, Cervantes' myth, Sappho's broken songs, the vast surge of Homer–everything is a report of one kind or another and the sum of all of them together is our little knowledge of our world and of ourselves. Call a book Das Kapital or The Voyage of the Beagle or Theory of Relativity or Alice in Wonderland or Moby-Dick, it is still what Kazantzakis called his book–it is still a "report" upon the "mystery of things." But if this is what a book is.. then a library is an extraordinary thing..The existence of a library is, in itself, an assertion.. It asserts that.. all these different and dissimilar reports, these bits and pieces of experience, manuscripts in bottles, messages from long before, from deep within, from miles beyond, belonged together and might, if understood together, spell out the meaning which the mystery implies..The library, almost alone of the great monuments of civilization, stands taller now than it ever did before. The city.. decays. The nation loses its grandeur.. The university is not always certain what it is. But the library remains: a silent and enduring affirmation that the great Reports still speak, and not alone but somehow all together.. . Archibald MacLeish
Some Similar Quotes
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  2. The love of learning, the sequestered nooks, And all the sweet serenity of books - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
  3. It starts so young, and I'm angry about that. The garbage we're taught. About love, about what's "romantic." Look at so many of the so-called romantic figures in books and movies. Do we ever stop and think how many of them would cause serious and... - Deb Caletti
  4. I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon woman's inconstancy. Songs and proverbs, all talk of woman's fickleness. But perhaps you will say, these were all written by men."" Perhaps I shall. Yes, yes,... - Jane Austen
  5. Someone once wrote that a novel should deliver a series of small astonishments. I get the same thing spending an hour with you. - E. Lockhart
More Quotes By Archibald MacLeish
  1. Around, around the sun we go: The moon goes round the earth. We do not die of death: We die of vertigo.
  2. And here face down beneath the sun And here upon earth's noonward height To feel the always coming on The always rising of the night
  3. A poem should not mean But be.
  4. A real writer learns from earlier writers the way a boy learns from an apple orchard -- by stealing what he has a taste for, and can carry off
  5. What is more important to a library than anything else -- than everything else -- is the fact that it exists.", American Scholar; Washington, DC, June 5, 1972]
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