I grew up in rural Tennessee. There were no bookstores in the town, but the school had a little library, and the town had a little library, each with a patient and enthusiastic librarian, and I raced into both as if they were doorways to another world.

E. B. White had a romantic tenderness toward nature in a capital R, 19th-century way. He was knowledgeable, a part-time farmer, and a hardheaded realistic person.

Henry David Thoreau was an oddball job quitter and ne'er-do-well who evolved into the bearded sage of literature, natural history, and civil liberties.

Michael Sims Quotes