Bodleian Quotes & Sayings

For one crazy moment he had the notion of a vanished tribe of librarians, lost in the deep underground caverns of the Bodleian, a wild and savage tribe that fed on unwary travellers. — Lavie Tidhar

Elias Ashmole, a seventeenth-century book collector and alchemist whose books and papers had come to the Bodleian from the Ashmolean Museum in the nineteenth century, along with the number 782. — Deborah Harkness

I took to the Bodleian library as to a lover and ... would sit long hours in Bodley's arms to emerge, blinking and dazed with the small and feel of all those books. — Laurie R. King

If I were not a king, I would be a university man; and if it were so that I must be a prisoner, if I might have my wish, I would desire to have no other prison than that library [the Bodleian]. — King James I

The Bodleian above anything else made Oxford what it was ... There was something incommunicably grand about it, something difficult to understand unless you had spent your evenings there or walked past it on the way to celebrate the boat race, a magic that came from ignoring it a thousand times a day and then noticing its overwhelming beauty when you came out of a tiny alley and it caught you unexpectedly. A library
it didn't sound like much, but it was what made Oxford itself. The greatest library in the world. — Charles Finch