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3d
Lawrence Hall
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Dispatches for the Colonial Office

                                 The Season of Back-To-School

                When Americans seize books from their children
    and form charitable committees to give them backpacks instead

A great many people did not say the following:

Once you have read a backpack you care about, some part of it is always with you. – Louis L’Amour

These backpacks gave Matilda a hopeful and comforting message: you are not alone. -Roald Dahl

Good friends, good backpacks, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life. ― Mark Twain

If there's a backpack that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it. ― Toni Morrison

“Classic” - a backpack which people praise and don't read. ― Mark Twain

When I have a little money, I buy backpacks; and if I have any left, I buy food and clothes. ― Erasmus of Rotterdam

I cannot live without backpacks. ― Thomas Jefferson

If you have a garden and a backpack, you have everything you need. ― Cicero

No backpack is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally – and often far more – worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond. ― C.S. Lewis

A backpack, too, can be a star, a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe. ― Madeleine L'Engle

And on the subject of burning backpacks: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain backpacks from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those backpacks.

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries. ― Kurt Vonnegut

Do you ever read any of the backpacks you burn? ― Ray Bradbury

You don’t have to burn backpacks to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them – Ray Bradbury

Knowing I loved my backpacks, he furnish’d me
From mine own library with backpacks that
I prize above my dukedom – Prospero in The Tempest I.ii.166-168
Written by
Lawrence Hall
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