A library is a place where you can lose your innocence without losing your virginity.
Interpretation
A library allows for exploration and growth of knowledge and ideas, often leading to a loss of naivety.
This quote highlights the transformative power of libraries as spaces for intellectual engagement. Germaine Greer suggests that within the walls of a library, one can explore complex ideas and confront challenging realities, leading to a maturation of thought and perspective, all while remaining in a safe and nurturing environment, thereby losing one's innocence in terms of naïveté rather than physical experiences.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of education, one might quote Germaine Greer to emphasize the role of libraries in personal development.
It is often falsely assumed, even by feminists, that sexuality is the enemy of the female who really wants to develop these aspects of her personality, and this is perhaps the most misleading aspect of movements like the National Organization of Women. It was not the insistence upon her sex that weakened the American woman student's desire to make something of her education, but the insistence upon a passive sexual role
The only perfect love to be found on earth is not sexual love, which is riddled with hostility and insecurity, but the wordless commitment of families, which takes as its model mother-love. This is not to say that fathers have no place, for father-love, with its driving for self-improvement and discipline, is also essential to survival, but that uncorrected father-love, father-love as it were practiced by both parents, is a way to annihilation.
Women live lives of continual apology. They are born and raised to take the blame for other people's behavior. If they are treated without respect, they tell themselves that they have failed to earn respect. If their husbands do not fancy them, it is because they are unattractive.
The wedding is the chief ceremony of the middle-class mythology, and it functions as the official entrée of the spouses to their middle-class status. This is the real meaning of saving up to get married. The young couple struggles to set up an image of comfortable life which they will be forced to live up to in the years that follow.
Guilt is one side of a nasty triangle; the other two are shame and stigma. This grim coalition combines to inculpate women themselves of the crimes committed against them.
Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.
When you're learning, especially to write, unless you're some incredibly gifted writer, a young Malcom Gladwell, say, you need to be imitating people. You need to be imitating how they make their work, how they structure it, how they design the pieces. It gives you chops; it gives you moves.
Books are divided into two classes, the books of the hour and the books of all time.
One thing we know for sure is that the Web is a collaborative medium unlike any we've ever had before. We see people working together, playing together, interacting in social settings using these media. We hope that will emerge as the new tool for education.
Teachers need to be comfortable talking about feelings.
We must do our best to raise the public awareness of the past in all its richness and complexity.
A nation under a well regulated government, should permit none to remain uninstructed. It is monarchical and aristocratical government only that requires ignorance for its support.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.