Public libraries are the sole community centers left in America. The degree to which a branch of the local library is connected to the larger culture is a reflection of the degree to which the community itself is connected to the larger culture.
Interpretation
Public libraries serve as vital community hubs that reflect a community's connection to broader culture.
In this quote, Russell Banks emphasizes the importance of public libraries as the last remaining community centers in America. He suggests that the extent to which these libraries engage with the larger cultural landscape mirrors how connected the community is to that culture, highlighting the role of libraries in fostering cultural awareness and community engagement.
In practice
In a speech about community engagement, one might say, 'As Russell Banks stated, public libraries are the sole community centers left in America.'
They were gone and I missed them but even so I was very happy. For the rest of my life no matter where on this planet earth I went and no matter how scared or confused I got, I could wait until dark and look up into the night sky and see my three friends again and my heart would swell with love of them and make me strong and clearheaded.
I much prefer working with kids whose life could be completely upended by a reading of a book over a weekend. You give them a book to read - they go home and come back a changed person. And that is so much more interesting and exciting.
Motivations are too tangled and complex.
Lists of books we reread and books we can't finish tell more about us than about the relative worth of the books themselves.
Through writing, through that process, they realize that they become more intelligent, and more honest and more imaginative than they can be in any other part of their life.
Every form of true education trains the student in self-reliance
I have nothing against investment banking, but it's like massaging money rather than creating money. If you're in physics, you create inventions, you create lasers, you create transistors, computers, GPS.
The methodologies of examining hip hop are borrowed from sociology, politics, religion, economics, urban studies, journalism, communications theory, American studies, transatlantic studies, black studies, history, musicology, comparative literature, English, linguistics, and other disciplines.
I lived in a plenty tough neighborhood. When somebody called me a 'dirty little Guinea', there was only one thing to do-break his head. When I got older, I realized that you shouldn't do it that way. I realized that you've got to do it through education. Children are not to blame. It is the parents. How can a child know whether his playmate is an Italian, a Jew or Irish, unless the parents have discussed it in the privacy of their homes.
It has been discovered that with a dull urban population, all formed under a mechanical system of State education, a suggestion or command, however senseless and unreasoned, will be obeyed if it be sufficiently repeated.
I have always felt that the true text-book for the pupil is his teacher
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.