Libraries Quotes

For thousands and thousands of American kids, libraries are the only safe place they can find to study, a haven free from the dangers of street or the numbing temptations of television. As schools cut back services, the library looms even more important to countless children. ~ Scott Turow

Love : so many people read about it in books and research on it in libraries yet so few discover the real feeling of it! ~ Avijeet Das

When I grew up, there were locked cabinets in public libraries. You needed parental permission if you were under eighteen. I was let down by the overblown reputations of some hardcore fictional works. ~ Allan Gurganus

In his library he had been always sure of leisure and tranquility; and though prepared, as he told Elizabeth, to meet with folly and conceit in every other room in the house, he was used to be free from them there ~ Jane Austen

Elizabeth laughed and pushed her father's shoulder. "Go, Papa, and be kind to him. I love him so. And it would be to your advantage to be on his good side."
Mr. Bennet raised his eyebrows. "Oh, and why is that?"
Because I have seen both his libraries in London and at Pemberley, Papa."
Interested and amused, Mr. Bennet said, "Ahh, and are they very grand, Lizzy?"
A more exquisite sight you will not see," she assured him. ~ KaraLynne Mackrory

It's not just the books Alba craves, it's standing inside a place that houses millions of them. Libraries are Alba's churches, and the university library, containing one edition of every book ever published in England, is her cathedral. ~ Menna Van Praag

I think that it's not enough to do the little Band-Aid things of having celebrities come and read to children. Not that we don't need to read to children, but we don't need to just do it one time and feel good about it. I think we need to think long range about poor people and their relationship to libraries. ~ Sandra Cisneros

Andrew Carnegie loved libraries; he knew their importance to an educated society and as anchors to our communities. And so, just as some loyal baseball fans travel to attend games at all 30 major league stadiums, over the last decade or so, I have slowly, casually, visited Carnegie libraries whenever I am on the road. ~ Sam Weller

All my life, the library has always been one of my favorite places to go. (Larry Brown: A Writer's Life by Jean W. Cash) ~ Larry Brown

What a school thinks about its library is a measure of what it feels about education. ~ Harold Howe

In a few years, men will be able to communicate more effectively through a machine than face to face. That is a rather startling thing to say, but it is our conclusion ... And we believe that we are entering a technological age in which we will be able to interact with the richness of living information
not merely in the passive way that we have become accustomed to using books and libraries, but as active participants in an ongoing process, bringing something to it through our interaction with it, and not simply receiving something from it by our connection to it. ~ J. C. R. Licklider

The world is full of disappointment," I said.
"Yes," she said, "I heard him say that. And every creature is simply trying to get what it wants, and to make their way through a difficult world. Do you believe that?"
"No," I said. "There's more than that."
"Like what?"
"Like good books," I said, "and good people. And good librarians, who are almost both at once. ~ Lemony Snicket

Impersonating a quiet, gentle librarian like Barbara Gordon
You deserve to be taken out of circulation! ~ Karl Kesel

I started with a book, and that led me to a library, and that led me everywhere. ~ Terry Pratchett

Libraries function as crucial technology hubs, not merely for free Web access, but those who need computer training and assistance. Library business centers help support entrepreneurship and retraining. ~ Scott Turow

A particularly good book had a way of opening new spaces in one's mind. It even invited you to come back later and rummage through what you'd learned. ~ Roshani Chokshi

If we didn't already have libraries, they would now have to be invented. They are the keys to American success in fully exploiting the information superhighways of the future. ~ James H. Billington

Before the birth of the New Woman the country was not an intellectual desert, as she is apt to suppose. There were teachers of thehighest grade, and libraries, and countless circles in our towns and villages of scholarly, leisurely folk, who loved books, and music, and Nature, and lived much apart with them. The mad craze for money, which clutches at our souls to-day as la grippe does at our bodies, was hardly known then. ~ Rebecca Harding Davis

I liked the thought that the book I was now holding had been held by dozens of others. ~ Doris Kearns Goodwin

We need to bridge the gap between the medical libraries and the hospital rooms; take the information out there already, add to it, focus it, harness it - and bring it to the patient who was just diagnosed today. ~ Bruce Vento

Dispersal was a conscious strategy of the plunderers. Only by destroying these collections could they build up new ones. Many of these libraries were the results of decades, sometimes centuries, of careful collecting. There had been generations of learned collectors and readers. The books also said something about the people who owned and treasured them: what they read and what they thought and what they dreamed. Sometimes they left traces in the form of underlined passages, notations, notes in the margins, or short comments. The beautiful and personally designed ex librises that many readers had made for their books demonstrate the care and pride they took in their libraries. Each collection in its own right took form in a unique culture, a depiction of its creator's world, which was lost when the library was broken up. The books are fragments of a library, of a world that once existed. ~ Anders Rydell

One of the many reasons I love libraries. Everyone is lost and not wanting to be found in a library. ~ Sarah Noffke

Public libraries are the last vestige of public free space. ~ Joshua Prince-Ramus

What is more important in a library than anything else - than everything else - is the fact that it exists. ~ Archibald MacLeish

THOMASINA:
But then the Egyptian noodle made carnal embrace with the enemy who burned the great library of Alexandria without so much as a fine for all that is overdue! ~ Tom Stoppard

Now," he said. "I want to hear about your day. Did you read any new books?"
"I've read all the books we have." She wrinkled her nose. "Armies aren't very good about carrying libraries with them. I can't imagine why. We'd fight so much less if everyone would just sit down and read."
Gifford's laugh rumbled through him, loud against her ear. "A question I often ask myself. Imagine how much money the realm would save if the rulers focused their finances on libraries, rather than wars."
"Not if I were allowed to shop for books."
"England would go bankrupt," he said gravely. "Thank God for wars."
She pushed him away, playful. "You can't switch sides like that."
The corner of his mouth quirked up. "It's too late. I've switched already, and since you've forbidden switching that quickly again, I'm stuck opposing you."
"Congratulations," she said. "You've just described our entire relationship. ~ Cynthia Hand

Linux provides programmers with everything they need: libraries, compilers, and debugging/development tools. These features are included in all standard Linux versions. ~ Andrew Johansen

With my childhood, it's a wonder I'm not psychotic. I was the little Jewish boy in the non-Jewish neighborhood. It was a little like being the first Negro enrolled in the all-white school. I grew up in libraries and among books, without friends. ~ Abraham Maslow

Invaders always destroy libraries. ~ Storm Jameson

There are a few things in life so beautiful they hurt: swimming in the ocean while it rains, reading alone in empty libraries, the sea of stars that appear when you're miles away from the neon lights of the city, bars after 2am, walking in the wilderness, all the phases of the moon, the things we do not know about the universe, and you. ~ Beau Taplin

When my father first took me to Ennis Library I went down among the shelves and felt company, not only the company of writers, but the readers too, because they had lifted and opened and read these books. The books were worn in a way they can only get worn by hands and eyes and minds ~ Niall Williams

... bums on the outside, libraries inside. ~ Ray Bradbury

He wouldn't be the one to prove to the world that there was an afterlife, but he hoped to be the one to prove it to himself, though he would have a few stern questions for a Creator who made people haunt libraries. ~ Thomm Quackenbush

The words are strung together, with their own special grammar-the laws of quantum theory-to form sentences, which are molecules. Soon we have books, entire libraries, made out of molecular "sentences." The universe is like a library in which the words are atoms. Just look at what has been written with these hundred words! Our own bodies are books in that library, specified by the organization of molecules-but the universe and literature are organizations of identical, interchangeable objects; they are information systems. ~ Heinz Pagels

I have three libraries. As a gift, a friend alphabetized and organized my main library of novels, history books, and nonfiction. Then I have a photo-book collection. Then there's this nearly whole room of my childhood books. I've also got cookbooks and a big collection of horse-related books. ~ Sally Mann

They say, hell, let the earth become a vast hell destroying killing and setting fire to the buildings of men, to theatres, national assemblies, to museums, libraries, prisons, psychiatric hospitals, old and new, from which they free the slaves. ~ Monique Wittig

...a library is not just a reference service: it is also a place for the vulnerable. From the elderly gentleman whose only remaining human interaction is with library staff, to the isolated young mother who relishes the support and friendship that grows from a Baby Rhyme Time session, to a slow moving 30-something woman collecting her CDs, libraries are a haven in a world where community services are being ground down to nothing. I've always known libraries are vital, but now I understand that their worth cannot be measured in books alone. ~ Angela Clarke

You know, you don't expect everyone to be as educated as everyone else or have the same achievements, but you expect at least to be offered at least some of the opportunities, and libraries are the most simple and the most open way to give people access to books. ~ Zadie Smith

The library, I presume," he said quietly. "I've a fondness for libraries. ~ Lorraine Heath

Give thy mind to books and libraries, and the literature and lore of the ages will give thee the wisdom of sage and seer. ~ Newell Dwight Hillis

An ebook is like having a photo of a dead loved one. It's convenient to look at and it will stir the mind, but it doesn't breathe. ~ Brandt Legg

I fall in love with any girl who smells of library paste. ~ Charles M. Schulz

For a person who grew up in the '30s and '40s in the segregated South, with so many doors closed without explanation to me, libraries and books said, 'Here I am, read me.' Over time I have learned I am at my best around books. ~ Maya Angelou

He helped the Librarian up. There was a red glow in the ape's eyes. It had tried to steal his books. This was probably the best proof any wizard could require that the trolleys were brainless. ~ Terry Pratchett

You've got to love libraries. You've got to love books. You've got to love poetry. You've got to love everything about literature. Then, you can pick the one thing you love most and write about it. ~ Ray Bradbury

A library is a place where you can lose your innocence without losing your virginity. ~ Germaine Greer

It's because of libraries that books like mine get recommended to book clubs and avid readers, who in turn pass them onto others looking to be whisked away from the world for a little while ... and perhaps to learn a bit about themselves in the process. ~ Jodi Picoult

What are the libraries of science but files of newspapers? ~ Henry David Thoreau

Why may we not be in the universe, as our dogs and cats are in our drawingrooms and libraries? ~ William James

Libraries rock! Not a sermon, just a fact. As a kid I was a library rat and books changed my life. They can change yours. ~ David Baldacci

Information is valuable. Librarians and libraries are, at best incidental; at worst, in the way. ~ Donald A. Barclay

Spies go to bars for the same reason people go to libraries: full of information if you know where to ask. ~ Michael Weston

I walked inside and paused for a moment to breathe in the scent of paper and dust - the perfumes of knowledge. ~ Chloe Neill

Digital books and other texts are increasingly coming under the control of distributors and other gatekeepers rather than readers and libraries. ~ Jonathan Zittrain

Libraries are full of ghosts, books being the most haunted things of all. ~ Maya Panika

A country that has few museums is both materially poor and spiritually poor ... Museums, like theaters and libraries, are a means to freedom. ~ Wendy Beckett

When I tried to access one of the other entertainment libraries, Vintage Movies, the system informed me that I wouldn't be granted access to a wider selection of entertainment options until I had received an above-average rating in three consecutive employee performance reviews. Then the system asked me if I wanted more information on the Indentured Employee Entertainment Reward Program. I didn't. ~ Ernest Cline

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

Books and bottles breed generosity, and the bibliophile and the oenophile og through life scattering largesse from their libraries and cellars ~ Holless Wilbur Allen

Fact is Our Lord knew all about the power of money: He gave capitalism a tiny niche in His scheme of things, He gave it a chance, He even provided a first installment of funds. Can you beat that? It's so magnificent. God despises nothing. After all, if the deal had come off, Judas would probably have endowed sanatoriums, hospitals, public libraries or laboratories. ~ Georges Bernanos

Civilization is knowledge, even more than it is urbanization, for you cannot have the latter without the former. Everything builds on everything else. And the knowledge of civilization is kept in repositories known as ... LIBRARIES, and if books burn, civilization burns with them. ~ James Turner

Funny thing about Gabby: you wouldn't know it from looking at him, with his golden halo and platonic beauty, but the guy was something of a pack rat. He'd been collecting little odds and ends since at least the double-digit redshifts. The interior reality of Gabriel's Magisterium burbled and shifted like convection currents in a star on the zaftig end of the main sequence. Because, I realized, that's what they were. Dull dim light, from IR to X-ray, oozed past me like the wax in a million-mile lava lamp while carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen nuclei did little do-si-dos about my toes. Every bubble, every sizzle, every new nucleus, every photodissociation tagged something of interest to Gabriel. The heart of this star smelled of roses and musty libraries. ~ Ian Tregillis

It was known as the Sick Man of Europe. It was in every way poorer than now. Yet there were flowerbeds on roundabouts, libraries and post offices in every village, cottage hospitals in abundance, council housing for all who needed it. It was a country so comfortable and enlightened that hospitals maintained cricket pitches for their staff and mental patients lived in Victorian palaces. If we could afford it then, why not now? Someone needs to explain to me how it is that the richer Britain gets the poorer it thinks itself. ~ Bill Bryson

Ordinary performers have giant TVs. Extraordinary performers have huge libraries. ~ Robin Sharma

I find that when I come out of the library I'm in what I call the library bliss of being totally taken away from the distractions of life.
[Woman's Day magazine, March 12, 2002] ~ Tracy Chevalier

Human knowledge consists not only of libraries of parchment and ink - it is also comprised of the volumes of knowledge that are written on the human heart, chiselled on the human soul, and engraved on the human psyche. ~ Michael Jackson

Had I the power, I would scatter libraries over the whole land, as the sower sows his wheat-field. ~ Horace Mann

She liked books, but the hours spent in small-town libraries were tedious, and she began the first list when she was eight or nine as a means of distraction. A list of names, eventually expanding to ten or twelve pages: Lilia, Gabriel, Anna, Michelle. In every town her name was different. ~ Emily St. John Mandel

The man who has a library of his own collection is able to contemplate himself objectively, and is justified in believing in his own existence. ~ Augustine Birrell

The library in summer is the most wonderful thing because there you get books on any subject and read them each for only as long as they hold your interest, abandoning any that don't, halfway or a quarter of the way through if you like, and store up all that knowledge in the happy corners of your mind for your own self and not to show off how much you know or spit it back at your teacher on a test paper. ~ Polly Horvath

All our institutions rest upon business. Without it we should not have schools, colleges, churches, parks, playgrounds, pavements, books, libraries, art, music, or anything else that we value. ~ Charles Gates, Jr.

Out of the closets and into the museums, libraries, architectural monuments, concert halls, bookstores, recording studios and film studios of the world. Everything belongs to the inspired and dedicated thief…. Words, colors, light, sounds, stone, wood, bronze belong to the living artist. They belong to anyone who can use them. Loot the Louvre! A bas l'originalité, the sterile and assertive ego that imprisons us as it creates. Vive le vol-pure, shameless, total. We are not responsible. Steal anything in sight. ~ William S. Burroughs

Usually, I set one foot in a library and I feel my own internal volume lower. A library is a physical equivalent of a sigh. It's the silence, sure, but it's also the certainty of all those books, the way they stand side by side with their still, calm conviction. It's the reassurance of knowledge in the face of confusion. ~ Deb Caletti

Yet what moved Our Blessed Lord to invective was not badness but just such self-righteousness as this…He said that the harlots and the Quislings would enter the Kingdom of Heaven before the self-righteous and the smug. Concerning all those who endowed hospitals and libraries and public works, in order to have their names graven in stone before their fellow men, He said, "Amen I say to you, they have received their reward" (Matt. 6:2). They wanted no more than human glory, and they got it. Never once is Our Blessed Lord indignant against those who are already, in the eyes of society, below the level of law and respectability. He attacked only the sham indignation of those who dwelt more on the sin than the sinner and who felt pleasantly virtuous, because they had found someone more vicious than they. He would not condemn those whom society condemned; his severe words were for those who had sinned and had not been found out…He would not add His burden of accusation to those that had already been hurled against the winebibbers and the thieves, the cheap revolutionists, the streetwalkers, and the traitors. They were everybody's target, and everybody knew that they were wrong…And the people who chose to make war against Our Lord were never those whom society had labeled as sinners. Of those who sentenced Him to death, none had ever had a record in the police court, had ever been arrested, was ever commonly known to be fallen or weak. But among his friends, who sorrowed at His deat ~ Fulton J. Sheen

What is the value of libraries? Through lifelong learning, libraries can and do change lives, a point that cannot be overstated. ~ Michael E. Gorman

Wouldn't it be good if we could let teachers do what they do best - teach. Not judge each child on a series of standardized exams. Let schools embrace, not exclude, those like me with a different way of thinking.
Stop praising literacy with one hand and closing libraries with the other. Let librarians be free to do what they do best: encourage a lifelong love of reading in every child, even the ones without a hope of ever getting an A star. ~ Sally Gardner

Knowledge sets us free, art sets us free. A great library is freedom...and that freedom must not be compromised. It must be available to all who need it, when they need it, and that's always. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Should he give free reign to his desires, the bibliomaniac can ruin his life along with the lives of his loved ones. He'll often take better care of his books than of his own health; he'll spend more on fiction than he does on food; he'll be more interested in his library than in his relationships, and, since few people are prepared to live in a place where every available surface is covered with piles of books, he'll often find himself alone, perhaps in the company of a neglected and malnourished cat. When he dies, all but forgotten, his body might fester for days before a curious neighbor grows concerned about the smell. ~ Mikita Brottman

A library is a hospital for the mind. - Anonymous ~ Alvin Toffler

Libraries are absolutely at the center of my life. Since I couldn't afford to go to college, I attended the library three or four days a week from the age of eighteen on, and graduated from the library when I was twenty-eight. ~ Ray Bradbury

When we say we can pull resources away from libraries, from culture, from those parts of the education system that are not about utility, what we are really saying is that the life of the mind is unnecessary. ~ Jeanette Winterson

Having fun isn't hard when you've got a library card.
[Arthur] ~ PBS Kids

A library, no matter how big or small, is a careful balance of love and responsibility. A machine, if you will, cranked by those who care most about reading. ~ Kimberly Karalius

Books were the window from which I looked out of a rather meager and decidedly narrow room onto a rich and wonderful universe. I loved the look and feel of books, even the smell ... Libraries were treasure houses. I always entered them with a slight thrill of disbelief that all their endless riches were mine for the borrowing. ~ Zilpha Keatley Snyder

I'm not precisely saying that a really good board meeting at the MLA (Museums, Libraries and Archives Coucil) makes me want to go and write poetry, but there is a pleasure in doing that sort of thing well. ~ Andrew Motion

The moral of this story is that many amazing, sometimes hidden, things happen in a library. What's the story behind yours? What's your tale? The world is waiting to hear your Once Upon a Time. ~ Kristin O'Donnell Tubb

A silent Library is a sad Library. A Library without patrons on whom to pile books and tales and knowing and magazines full of up-to-the-minute politickal fashions and atlases and plays in pentameter! A Library should be full of exclamations! Shouts of delight and horror as the wonders of the world are discovered or the lies of the heavens are uncovered or the wild adventures of devil-knows-who sent romping out of the pages. A Library should be full of now-just-a-minutes and that-can't-be-rights and scientifick folk running skelter to prove somebody wrong. It should positively vibrate with laughing at comedies and sobbing at tragedies, it should echo with gasps as decent ladies glimpse indecent things and indecent ladies stumble upon secret and scandalous decencies! A Library should not shush; it should roar! ~ Catherynne M Valente

Each spine with its shelf-mark code in familiar typewriter font, each date stamp a footprint of readers gone before and each shelf with its alphabetical ordering - these things align to provide the orderliness so cherished in a library. There is safety and structure amongst the stacks. Everything has a place, and you have found yours. ~ Daniel Gray

Television and film are our libraries now. Our history books. ~ David Strathairn

I have always had a special affinity for libraries and librarians, for the most obvious reasons. I love books. (One of my first Jobs was shelving books at a branch of the Chicago Public Library.) Libraries are a pillar of any society. I believe our lack of attention to funding and caring for them properly in the United States has a direct bearing on problems of literacy, productivity, and our inability to compete in today's world. Libraries are everyman's free university. ~ John Jakes

Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future. Just ask Ray Bradbury. ~ Kami Garcia

What is a library, but a temple of truth? What other function do books have, the great ones, but to change the reader? Books to comfort. But most of all, books to disturb you forward. ~ Jon Cohen

If the library in the morning suggests an echo of the severe and reasonable wishful order of the world, the library at night seems to rejoice in the world's essential, joyful muddle. ~ Alberto Manguel

In truth, my Anglophilia is fundamentally bookish: I yearn for one of those country house libraries, lined on three walls with mahogany bookshelves, their serried splendor interrupted only by enough space to display, above the fireplace, a pair of crossed swords or sculling oars and perhaps a portrait of some great English worthy. ~ Michael Dirda

In the library
I search for a good book.
We have many books,
says Mrs. Rose, the librarian,
and ALL of them are good.
Of course she says that. It's her job.
But do I want to read about
Trucks
Trains and
Transport?
Or even
Horses
Houses and
Hyenas?

In the fiction corner
there are pink boks
full of princesses
and girls who want to be princesses
and black books
about bad boys
and brave boys
and brawny boys.

Where is the book
about a girl
whose poems don't rhyme
and whose Granny is fading?
Pearl, says Mrs. Rose, the bell has rung.

I go back to class
empty-handed
empty headed
empty-hearted. ~ Sally Murphy

Poor people have big TV's. Rich people have big libraries. ~ Jim Rohn

But the central branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library was still a place of wonders to Tess, even if the book budget had been slashed and the hours cut. Her parents had made a lot of mistakes, a fact Tess compulsively shared on first dates, but she gave them credit for doing one thing right: Starting when she was eight, they gave her a library card and dropped her off at the downtown Pratt every Saturday while they shopped. Twenty-one years later, Tess still entered through the children's entrance on the side, pausing to toss a penny in the algae-coated fish pond, then climbing the stairs to the main hall. If she could be married here, she would. ~ Laura Lippman

That's what I like so much about old libraries - they smell the way we'd like to imagine the past. ~ Ruth Reichl

Libraries do one thing that no other institution does and that's provide access to all. ~ LeVar Burton

I always feel a certain sense of reverence in libraries, even small city ones that smell like homeless internet users. ~ Ken Jennings