Askwith Library Quotes

I see the beauty of books and sacred-souls of every author displaced in a bookshop. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

They parked in a pay-bay on George Square and walked through the gardens, emerging in front of the university library. Most of the buildings here had gone up in the 1960s, and Rebus hated them: blocks of sand-colored concrete replacing the square's original eighteenth-century town houses. Rows of treacherous steps, and a notorious wind-tunnel effect which could blow over the unwary on the wrong day. Students walked between the buildings, hugging books and folders in front of them. Some stood and chatted in groups.
"Bloody students," was Wylie's concise summing-up of the situation. ~ Ian Rankin

While we played, Meiying often sat by herself on the bench, huddled against the chill, looking at the library books on her lap, the pages glowing under the street lamp. The pages would sometimes turn in the wind, but she did not notice. ~ Wayson Choy

I was walking home from the library on Broadway, and I remember that the street looked different to me, very clear and beautiful, and I felt incredibly happy. I even said to myself, 'I've never been happier than I am now. ~ Siri Hustvedt

His library was a fine dark place bricked with books, so anything could happen there and always did. All you had to do was pull a book from the shelf and open it and suddenly the darkness was not so dark anymore. ~ Ray Bradbury

Madam, a circulating library in a town is as an evergreen tree of diabolical knowledge; it blossoms through the year. And depend on it that they who are so fond of handling the leaves, will long for the fruit at last. ~ Richard Brinsley Sheridan

Being a writer in a library is rather like being a eunuch in a harem. ~ John Braine

A well-stocked, well-staffed library is like a gardener who plants books, knowledge, and dreams and grows readers, learners, and do-ers. ~ Laura Purdie Salas

Those moments when you feel you want to read something truly beautiful. The eyes make a tour of the library, and there is nothing. Then you decide to take no matter what, and it is full of beautiful things. ~ Jules Renard

It isn't that information is exploding, but accessibility is. There's just about as much information this year as there was last year; it's been growing at a steady rate. It's just that now it's so much more accessible because of information technology. The consensus is that a Web crawler could get to a terabyte of publicly accesible HTML. A terabyte is about a million books. the UC Berkeley library has about 8 million books, and the Library of Congress has 20 million books. ~ Hal Varian

Charlie Kaufman: There was this time in high school. I was watching you out the library window. You were talking to Sarah Marsh.
Donald Kaufman: Oh, God. I was so in love with her.
Charlie Kaufman: I know. And you were flirting with her. And she was being really sweet to you.
Donald Kaufman: I remember that.
Charlie Kaufman: Then, when you walked away, she started making fun of you with Kim Canetti. And it was like they were laughing at *me*. You didn't know at all. You seemed so happy.
Donald Kaufman: I knew. I heard them.
Charlie Kaufman: How come you looked so happy?
Donald Kaufman: I loved Sarah, Charles. It was mine, that love. I owned it. Even Sarah didn't have the right to take it away. I can love whoever I want.
Charlie Kaufman: But she thought you were pathetic.
Donald Kaufman: That was her business, not mine. You are what you love, not what loves you. That's what I decided a long time ago.
Donald Kaufman: What's up?
Charlie Kaufman: Thank you.
Donald Kaufman: For what? ~ Charlie Kaufman

Jorge Luis Borges: "I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library." "The ~ Suzanne Kelman

I went into the library and read about fast food and became amazed by all the stuff I didn't know. I learned that there is a whole world behind the counter that, it seemed to me, has been deliberately hidden from the public. ~ Eric Schlosser

The woman was putting her purse in the drawer and settling down behind the desk, and I realized I had never seen her before in my life. Her face was as wrinkled as one of those forgotten apples you sometimes find in the pocket of last year's winter jacket.
Yes? she said, peering over her spectacles. They teach them to do that at the Royal Academy of Library Science. ~ Alan Bradley

Deserted libraries hold the shades of writers who worked within, and are haunted by their absence. ~ Alberto Manguel

Although I enjoy digging through the library to help students find books, my aim is to help them develop self-confidence in choosing books for themselves. ~ Donalyn Miller

During the week that I arrived in the United States, I saw an airport, used a telephone, used a library, talked with a scientist, and was shown a computer for the first time in my life. ~ Philip Emeagwali

We find the library world, like the real world, impossible to understand on a rational basis. We turn then to the outer reaches of our mind and treat librarianship with the irrationality that it deserves. While we most often turn to humour merely to enjoy ourselves, we do sometimes do so to make a point. That point is simply that the world of librarianship is ridiculous and that we should all take a far less serious view of our work. What we accomplish as librarians is not, after all, likely to change the world."
~ Norman D. Stevens ~ Peter Gellatly

I have bad news to tell you two poor boys have died at stonyhurst within the last 3 weeks from getting croup. to my great delight 50 new books have been brought for the library. ~ Jon L. Lellenberg

Let your library be a testimonial of your dedicated interest in accelerated personal development, that you will read whatever you have to read you will hear whatever you must hear and you will watch and see whatever you must see in order to make your life refined and worthwhile and achieve all your purpose. ~ Jim Rohn

She thought of the library, so shining white and new; the rows and rows of unread books; the bliss of unhurried sojourns there and of going out to a restaurant, alone, to eat. ~ Maud Hart Lovelace

And spend lonely nights in the library or laboratory pursuing a glowing truth that only six or seven people will ever care about. ~ Anonymous

Is there anything in a world more magical than a library? ~ Lucy Powrie

The librarian isn't a clerk who happens to work in a library. A librarian is a data hound, a guide, a sherpa and a teacher. The librarian is the interface between reams of data and the untrained but motivated user. ~ Seth Godin

Half of my library are old books because I like seeing how people thought about their world at their time. So that I don't get bigheaded about something we just discovered and I can be humble about where we might go next. Because you can see who got stuff right and most of the people who got stuff wrong. ~ Neil DeGrasse Tyson

You shut down a library Louisa, you don't just shut down a building, you shut down hope. ~ Jojo Moyes

I wake up and read although Nietzsche says that's foolish. A sort of narcotic, reading. I read with my hands down the front of my pants - my mode of reading is masturbatory. Sometimes I feel guilty about my lubed fingers all over library books. ~ Kate Zambreno

Our lips met hungrily, and his clever artistic hands wrapped around my hips. A sudden buzz from my regular cell phone startled me from the kissing.
"Don't," said Adrian, his eyes ablaze and breathing ragged.
"What if there's a crisis at school?" I asked. "What if Angeline 'accidentally' stole one of the campus buses and drove it into the library?"
"Why would she do that?"
"Are you saying she wouldn't?"
He sighed. "Go check it. ~ Richelle Mead

A gentleman ... sleeps at his work. That's what work's for. Why do you think they have the SILENCE notices in the library? So as not to disturb me in my little nook behind the biography shelves. ~ Alan Ayckbourn

You have to understand that the Bible is really a library of books and it has different categories of material. There are certain parts which you have to say no to. The Bible accepted slavery. St Paul said women should not speak in church at all and there are people who have used that to say women should not be ordained. There are many things that you shouldn't accept. ~ Desmond Tutu

The study found widespread dissatisfaction with our town's public library, and, when considering the facts, it's easy to see why. The public computers for Internet use are outdated and slow. The lending period of fourteen days is not nearly long enough to read lengthier books, given the busy schedule of all our lives. The fatality rate is also well above the national average for public libraries. ~ Joseph Fink

Is there anything so delicious as the first exploration of a great library - alone - unwatched? ~ Richard Jefferies

My maternal grandmother - she was a compulsive reader. She had only been through five grades of elementary school, but she was a member of the municipal library, and she brought home two or three books a week for me. They could be dime novels or Balzac. ~ Umberto Eco

The function of a great library is to store obscure books. ~ Nicholson Baker

When I stepped into the brown-tiled entryway of the Kentwood Public Library, the sunlight flowing down on me from the high windows, I felt a sense of importance. It gratified me to be in a place devoted to books and quiet; I was filled with a sense of hope. Reading to me was fundamental, as fundamental as food. And nothing could be more satisfying than reading a good book while eating a good meal of mi soup, french fries, and a thin cut of steak. I plowed through books as fast as possible in order to read them again. ~ Bich Minh Nguyen

There's a library," I said, "and a fine journalist, and several interesting people. That's more than most places have. ~ Lemony Snicket

I spent three years researching American Rose, research that included connecting with Gypsy's sister, the late actress June Havoc (I was the last person to interview her) and Gypsy's son, and also spending countless hours immersed in Gypsy's expansive archives at the New York Public Library. I became obsessed with figuring out the person behind the persona. ~ Karen Abbott

On a very personal level, I have fond memories of spending a lot of time in the Library of Congress working on my collection of poems 'Native Guard.' I was there over a summer doing research in the archives and then writing in the reading room at the Jefferson building. ~ Natasha Trethewey

It's funny, we started writing chick-lit when it was just becoming a crowded marketplace, and now the same thing is happening with YA. It really used to just be one shelf at the library - Nancy Drew and Judy Blume. ~ Emma McLaughlin

When he was seventy-four years old the Cretan novelist Nikos Kazantzakis began a book. He called it Report to Greco... Kazantzakis thought of himself as a soldier reporting to his commanding officer on a mortal mission - his life. ...

Well, there is only one Report to Greco, but no true book... was ever anything else than a report. ... A true book is a report upon the mystery of existence... it speaks of the world, of our life in the world. Everything we have in the books on which our libraries are founded - Euclid's figures, Leonardo's notes, Newton's explanations, Cervantes' myth, Sappho's broken songs, the vast surge of Homer - everything is a report of one kind or another and the sum of all of them together is our little knowledge of our world and of ourselves. Call a book Das Kapital or The Voyage of the Beagle or Theory of Relativity or Alice in Wonderland or Moby-Dick, it is still what Kazantzakis called his book - it is still a "report" upon the "mystery of things."

But if this is what a book is... then a library is an extraordinary thing. ...

The existence of a library is, in itself, an assertion. ... It asserts that... all these different and dissimilar reports, these bits and pieces of experience, manuscripts in bottles, messages from long before, from deep within, from miles beyond, belonged together and might, if understood together, spell out the meaning which the mystery implies. ...

The library, almost alone of the g ~ Archibald MacLeish

In a great library, you get into society in the widest sense ... From that great crowd you can choose what companions you please, for in these silent gatherings ... the highest is at the service of the lowest with a grand humility. In a library you become a true citizen of the world. ~ W. Somerset Maugham

But at night, when the library lamps are lit, the outside world disappears and nothing but the space of books remains in existence. ~ Alberto Manguel

Seduced her? Every time I turned round she was up a library ladder. In the end I gave in. That reminds me - I spotted something between her legs that made me think of you. ~ Tom Stoppard

The Parkchester Library was my haven. To thumb through the card catalog was to touch an infinite bounty, more books than I could ever possibly exhaust. ~ Sonia Sotomayor

Starting on February 1, 2010, and running through until May 30, I will be Toronto Public Library's Writer in Residence, working out of the Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Speculation at the Lillian H. Smith branch at College and Spadina. ~ Karl Schroeder