Monday Quotes #3

I’ve always loved quotes. There is something about them… they are right down to the point, pure wisdom, clear observations, hilarious humor…Thought, I never had a memory for them for some reason. I could always remember that someone said something great about something, but I could never remember who that was or how precisely it was said. Therefore, I decided to start this Monday quotes thing - I will post each Monday a quote that I like and try to explain what is it in that quote that clicking me.

"A room without books is like a body without a soul."
— Marcus Tullius Cicero

"To add a library to a house is to give that house a soul."
— Marcus Tullius Cicero

These two quotes have identical meaning, so I included both of them.

These quotes are so close to my heart, because I grew up around books. My grandfather’s and grandmother’s three bedroom apartment had thousands of books, pretty much all the walls from floor to ceiling were covered with book shelves – fancy book shelves, regular ones, handmade selves and even very old and ugly ones. The look was not really important – the important was that they were able to hold books. I remember every year my grandfather would collect couple of hundred books to donate to the library, because this was the only way to create a space for new ones. I remember when I was staying with grandfather and grandmother over the summer, almost every day when grandfather was returning from work, he would bring a new book, and that was one of the most exciting moments in the day, because it was like a birthday or Christmas every day.

My parents’ apartment was covered with books as well. We had much less books then grandfather, but still book were everywhere, in every room. Once in a while I was getting a chair to climb on the top shelf and was going, as I used to call it, exploring. By the time I was ten, I was convinced that I knew all the books that we had, but still every time on my exploration mission I was discovering a new ones for myself. My birthday and New Years gifts always included book, if not contained only books.

With all that said, I feel really uncomfortable without books being close by, I feel literally like something is missing. So when I moved to Florida, I brought almost the whole suitcase full of books and started to build my own library. As of today I have around tree hundred books. I know, it is not a much, but all of them are dear to me and close to my heart.

Some two or three years ago, when my husband and I were looking for a house, we went through around fifty houses and most of them were still occupied by their owners. I was not only looking at the houses themselves, but also what people did with that space, how they furnished it, to get an idea for myself what I can do with that. While visiting other people’s homes I’ve noticed some similarities and one of them was – all those houses, with exception of one, didn’t have any books. They didn’t have any book shelves, no they had any books laying around. Even in the teenager’s rooms there were no books, neither textbooks. There were, however, bunch of magazines scattered around the house, which made me believe that owners didn’t try to put away stuff for our visit.

One might disagree with me, saying that with modern technology, I probably wasn’t able to see these books, because they were in the electronic format saved on the computers, or laptop, or Kindle, or any other eBook reader. But I think that we are not that far into eBooks , so that house would not have any paper books.

The thought about the houses that didn’t have any books scared me, probably as much as the thought about the person without the soul would scare me, so I definitely agree with that quote.