{"id":43261,"date":"2025-08-21T06:30:01","date_gmt":"2025-08-20T18:30:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/?p=43261"},"modified":"2025-08-20T19:20:18","modified_gmt":"2025-08-20T07:20:18","slug":"carl-sagan-on-books-a-quote-for-your-thursday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/2025\/08\/21\/carl-sagan-on-books-a-quote-for-your-thursday\/","title":{"rendered":"Carl Sagan On Books: A Quote for Your Thursday :)"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3><em><span style=\"color: #333333;\">\u201cWhat an astonishing thing a book is. It&#8217;s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you&#8217;re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.&#8221;<\/span><\/em><\/h3>\n<h3><span style=\"color: #333333;\">~ <a href=\"https:\/\/science.nasa.gov\/people\/carl-sagan\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Carl Sagan<\/a>, 1934 &#8211; 1996<\/span><\/h3>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-43262\" src=\"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/Cosmos_Carl-Sagan-194x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"194\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/Cosmos_Carl-Sagan-194x300.jpg 194w, https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/Cosmos_Carl-Sagan-97x150.jpg 97w, https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/Cosmos_Carl-Sagan-768x1185.jpg 768w, https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/Cosmos_Carl-Sagan-664x1024.jpg 664w, https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/Cosmos_Carl-Sagan.jpg 1037w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 194px) 100vw, 194px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m busy beavering on the &#8220;you know what&#8221; so am settling for this quote as today&#8217;s post &#8212; but when it comes to quotes there is no &#8216;settling&#8217;, because what a humdinger! I not only love the sentiment &#8212; which <em>may<\/em> just have something to do with why I write books. \ud83d\ude00<\/p>\n<p>Enjoy!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cWhat an astonishing thing a book is. It&#8217;s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you&#8217;re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,10,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43261","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-funstuff","category-general","category-other-writers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43261","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43261"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43261\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43267,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43261\/revisions\/43267"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43261"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43261"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43261"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}