Book Quote by Lawrence Clark Powell

A classic isn’t a museum piece; it’s a live wire. Lawrence Clark Powell’s definition of greatness hinges on a sly inversion of what people usually mean by “old.” The point isn’t that a canonical book has survived time like a well-preserved artifact. It’s that it keeps refusing to stay in its own era. “Always being modern” is a deliberately provocative standard, because it treats modernity not as a date stamp but as a renewable effect: the text keeps generating present-tense urgency in readers who weren’t its intended audience.

Powell, a major librarian and bookman, is also quietly arguing against the gatekeeping aura that clings to “so-called classic.” That phrase punctures the pomp. It suggests skepticism toward the way classics can be used as cultural badges, assigned reading, or weapons of taste. For him, the canon earns its keep only when it remains conversational. Dead authors don’t get points for being dead; they get points for still being legible, still being sharp, still picking fights we recognize.

The subtext is a defense of reading as an active relationship rather than passive reverence. A book becomes “great” when it anticipates reinterpretation, when it’s porous enough to absorb new anxieties and still push back. Each generation doesn’t just receive the book; it remakes it, and the best books are built to withstand that pressure. Powell’s line is ultimately democratic: the classic is not what institutions certify, but what continues to speak where it shouldn’t be able to.