Quote of the Day (Pete Hamill, on When ‘The Way Out of Poverty Was Through the Library’)

“I come from the white working class, but I was fortunate. I had parents that thought things would be better tomorrow or the day after tomorrow and the way out of poverty was through the library. My mother got me a library card when I was five. I couldn't read yet, and there were mothers like that all over New York.”—Irish-American columnist-novelist-memoirist Pete Hamill, quoted in Richard Turner, “Weekend Confidential: Pete Hamill—A Lifetime of Big Stories, Revisited,” The Wall Street Journal, Jan. 19-20, 2019

(Photo of Pete Hamill taken in Brooklyn in September 2007 by David Shankbone.)