Human beings are creatures of emotion, however, and as soon as a word is created through the mouth of the speaker, then that the speaker places himself at the mercy of the other. The speaker becomes immediately vulnerable and so exposes his inner self to the other half of the partnership. Even the simplest of reference questions is an offering, to some degree, of oneself to another. For many that involves a great deal of personal pain and even for the strongest of us, it exposes a degree of weakness which screams out against our need for survival. We never want to display our personal vulnerabilities to others and always have a strong tendency to mask our true selves.

Cohen, The Hermeneutics of the Reference Question

One more quote from Caitlin...

A library in the middle of a community is a cross between an emergency exit, a life-raft and a festival. They are cathedrals of the mind; hospitals of the soul; theme parks of the imagination. On a cold rainy island, they are the only sheltered public spaces where you are not a consumer, but a citizen instead.

Libraries

Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors. The library connects us with the insights and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from all of our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species. Public libraries depend on voluntary contributions. I think the health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all be tested by how well we support our libraries.

The building looked like something out of the Knights of the Round Table, and the inside was even more astonishing.  Who knew so many books even existed?  That summer with the lady at the park made a lifelong reader out of me, and my Houston Heights Library card was one of my most cherished possessions.