Quotes & Sayings About Libraries

A book has been taken. A book has been taken? You summoned the Watch," Carrot drew himself up proudly, "because someone's taken a book? You think that's worse than murder?"
The Librarian gave him the kind of look other people would reserve for people who said things like "What's so bad about genocide? — Terry Pratchett

The places of quiet are going away, the churches, the woods, the libraries. And it is only in silence we can hear the voice inside of us which gives us true peace. — James Rozoff

It was a pity that most people didn't actually go to libraries anymore, not when they could sit in the comfort of their own quarters and access files electronically. Want to read the new hot interstellar caper novel, or the latest issue of Beings holozine? Input the name, touch a control, and zip - it's in your datapad. . . .
There were, of course, old-fashioned beings who would still actually trundle down to where the files were. On some worlds the most ancient libraries kept books - actual bound volumes of printed matter - lined up neatly on shelves, and readers would walk the aisles, take a volume down, sniff the musty-dusty odor of it, and then carry it to a table to leisurely peruse.
There weren't many of those readers left, and they were growing rarer all the time . . . But there were some who still knew how to actually turn a page - and for those who were willing to do so, the rewards could be great indeed. — Michael Reaves And Steve Perry

All across America public libraries were, and are, being shut down, while prisons-with libraries-were, and are, being built. This has been a choice the American public has been making for over thirty years. — Avi Steinberg

I would say television is a focus, and expanding our channel platform is a focus. As for buying libraries, when catalogs are going down in value, the answer is that it's all about price! — Jon Feltheimer

Books are carnival rides for your imagination. — Richelle E. Goodrich

For all her faults, it was actually my mom who instilled in me a love of reading, and books, for which I will always be grateful. She's a complete bibliophile, so I've pretty much grown up around libraries and books. — Paula Gruben

For an academic to launch a public conversation about journalistic integrity, the role of religion in society, scholarship and faith is a dream come true. These are the kinds of things that we sit around talking to each other about in our dusty libraries. To see these conversations take place in popular culture is the best thing that could have ever happened. — Reza Aslan

Before Gutenberg, libraries were small
the Cambridge University library had only 122 volumes in 1424, for instance; after Gutenberg literacy became widespread. — Larry Stone

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

If modern civilization should disappear today, but leave libraries untouched, survivors could open almost any book and perceive immediately that persons living south of the Sahara are called "Blacks." The term "Black Africa" would suffice to indicate the habitat of the Black race. Nothing similar is found in Egyptian texts. Whenever the Egyptians use the word "Black" (khem), it is to designate themselves or their country: Kemit, land of the Blacks. — Cheikh Anta Diop

Our libraries are so to speak prisons where we've locked up our intellectual giants, naturally Kant has been put in solitary confinement, like Nietzsche, like Schopenhauer, like Pascal, like Voltaire, like Montaigne, all the real giants have been put in solitary confinement, all the others in mass confinement, but everyone for ever and ever, my friend, for all time and unto eternity, that's the truth. — Thomas Bernhard

More than a building that houses books and data, the library has always been a window to a larger world
a place where we've always come to discover big ideas and profound concepts that help move the American story forward ...
Libraries remind us that truth isn't about who yells the loudest, but who has the right information. Because even as we're the most religious of people, America's innovative genius has always been preserved because we also have a deep faith in facts.
And so the moment we persuade a child, any child, to cross that threshold into a library, we've changed their lives forever, and for the better. This is an enormous force for good. — Barack Obama

The weight of absence is as much a feature of any library as the constriction of order and space. — Alberto Manguel

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

Today, if you want to access a typical out-of-print book, you have only one choice - fly to one of a handful of leading libraries in the country and hope to find it in the stacks. — Sergey Brin

There is something so deeply visceral about libraries for me-rooms and rooms full of people dreaming and remembering. — Jacqueline Woodson

An indigenous culture with sufficient territory, and bilingual and intercultural education, is in a better position to maintain and cultivate its mythology and shamanism. Conversely, the confiscation of their lands and imposition of foreign education, which turns their young people into amnesiacs, threatens the survival not only of these people, but of an entire way of knowing. It is as if one were burning down the oldest universities in the world and their libraries, one after another - thereby sacrificing the knowledge of the world's future generations. — Jeremy Narby

I cannot sufficiently celebrate the glorious liberty that reigns in the public libraries of the twentieth century as compared with the intolerable management of those of the nineteenth century, in which the books were jealously railed away from the people, and obtainable only at an expenditure of time and red tape calculated to discourage any ordinary taste for literature. — Edward Bellamy

I discovered reading through libraries. I grew up in a house that wasn't brimming with books. — Mark Billingham

Libraries are, at heart, helpful and kind providers. It is hard for those who perhaps don't feel the need to visit their local libraries to understand what a vital service they provide for communities and individuals who do - and those who do are often the most vulnerable. — Robert Popple

Nothing is pleasanter to me than exploring in a library. — Walter Savage Landor

To be a librarian is not to be neutral, or passive, or waiting for a question. It is to be a radical positive change agent within your community. — R. David Lankes

Libraries are what is best about us as a society: open, exciting, rich, informative, free, inclusive, engaging. — Susan Orlean

If I finish a book a week, I will read only a few thousand books in my lifetime, about a tenth of a percent of the contents of the greatest libraries of our time. The trick is to know which books to read. — Carl Sagan

People question what I thought of Oxford. Students used to talk about the 'Oxford bubble' because the place can make you feel cut off from the rest of the world. I would forget there were places like London that were not centred round libraries and essays. — Samantha Shannon

What is also strange to me is that public libraries have always been in the forefront of opposing censorship. — Matthew Lesko

Children know that if they have a question about the world, the library is the place to find the answer. And someone will always be there to help them find the answer-our librarians. (A librarian's) job is an important one. Our nation runs on the fuel of information and imagination that libraries provide. And they are in charge of collecting and sharing this information in a helpful way. Librarians inform the public, and by doing so, they strengthen our great democracy. — Laura Bush

What does it profit you that all the libraries of the world should be yours? Not knowledge but what one does with knowledge is your profit. — Saib Tabrizi

Children have to have access to books, and a lot of children can't go to a store and buy a book. We need not only our public libraries to be funded properly and staffed properly, but our school libraries. Many children can't get to a public library, and the only library they have is a school library. — Katherine Paterson

A library is a different kind of social reality (of the three dimensional kind), which by its very existence teaches a system of values beyond the fiscal. — Zadie Smith

Destiny smells of dust and the libraries of the night. — Neil Gaiman

Don't you think it's funny that the presidents are still expected to build libraries when hardly anyone reads books? I read a study that said less than ten percent of adults read a book in the past year. — Dustin Lawson

BERNARD. (To DONALD.) Donald, read any new libraries lately?

DONALD. One or three. I did the complete works of Doris Lessing this week. I've been depressed.

[. . .]

BERNARD. Some people eat, some people drink, and some take dope.

DONALD. I read.

MICHAEL. And read and read and read. It's a wonder your eyes don't turn back in your head at the sight of a book jacket.

HANK. Well, at least he's a constructive escapist. — Mart Crowley

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

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

Historic figures have homes to visit for posterity; the Lord of history left no home. Luminaries leave libraries and write their memoirs; He left one book, penned by ordinary people. Deliverers speak of winning through might and conquest; He spoke of a place in the heart. — Ravi Zacharias

Some libraries are no longer called libraries but are known as Learning Resource Centers or Media Centers. Librarians, however, are still generally known as librarians and not yet as Learning Resourcists or Media Centerists, though this may be only a matter of time. — Richard Armour

Access to knowledge is the superb, the supreme act of truly great civilizations. Of all the institutions that purport to do this, free libraries stand virtually alone in accomplishing this. — Toni Morrison

They talk to kids in their regular voices and say things that they would say in their own living rooms. Their bulletin boards are always a little raggedy, and their desks are always a little messy, and their libraries are always a little out of order, but kids love them because they talk about real things with real voices and they always tell the truth. — Matthew Dicks

A lot of my travel is at least partly work, visiting schools and libraries, especially in France. — Quentin Blake

Cutting libraries during a recession is like cutting hospitals during a plague. — Eleanor Crumblehulme Library Assistant University Of British Columbia

Free people write books," it said. "Free people publish books. Free people sell books. Free people buy books. Free people read books. In the spirit of America's commitment to free expression we inform the public that this book will be available to readers at bookshops and libraries throughout the country. — Salman Rushdie

There is nowhere in the world where sleep is so deep as in the libraries of the House of Commons. — Henry Channon

All the books we own, both read and unread, are the fullest expression of self we have at our disposal ... But with each passing year, and with each whimsical purchase, our libraries become more and more able to articulate who we are, whether we read the books or not. — Nick Hornby

All libraries must submit to a certain order, I answered. Indeed, agreed the professor, or all will be lost. The fall of nations and empires begins with the fall of libraries. — Rawi Hage

Classroom libraries are not 25 copies of 5 books. Classroom libraries are 1000-2000 copies of different books. — Richard Allington

He [Andrew Carnegie] wanted people to be able to lift themselves, to educate themselves, to train themselves. And there was no better way to do that than with libraries. — David Nasaw

The visitor enters and says, "What a lot of books! Have you read them all?" ... The best answer is the one always used by Roberto Leydi: "And more, dear sir, many more," which freezes the adversary and plunges him into a state of awed admiration. But I find it merciless and angst-generating. Now I have fallen back on the riposte: "No, these are the ones I have to read by the end of the month. I keep the others in my office. — Umberto Eco

I am a librarian. I discovered me in the library. I went to find me in the library. Before I fell in love with libraries, I was just a six-year-old boy. The library fueled all of my curiosities, from dinosaurs to ancient Egypt. When I graduated from high school in 1938, I began going to the library three nights a week. I did this every week for almost ten years and finally, in 1947, around the time I got married, I figured I was done. So I graduated from the library when I was twenty-seven. I discovered that the library is the real school. — Ray Bradbury

We English majors ... need to promote public libraries as a tool in the war against terror. How many readers of Edith Wharton have engaged in terroristic acts? I challenge you to name one ... Do we need to wait until our cities lie in smoking ruins before we wake up to the fact that a first-class public library is a vital link in national defense? — Garrison Keillor

Further, in writing, I feel corrupt and unethical if I have to look up a subject in a library as part of the writing itself. This acts as a filter
it is the only filter. If the subject is not interesting enough for me to look it up independently, for my own curiosity or purposes, and I have not done so before, then I should not be writing about it at all, period. It does not mean that libraries (physical and virtual) are not acceptable; it means that they should not be the source of any idea. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

We like to say the Internet is the ultimate library. But libraries are libraries because people come together and fund them through taxes. Libraries actually exist, all over the country, so why is it such a reach to imagine and to someday build a public institution that has a digital aspect to it? Of course the problem is that libraries and other public services are being defunded and are under attack, so there's a bigger progressive struggle this plays into. — Astra Taylor

Professor Wilkes is best known as the builder and designer of the EDSAC, the first computer with an internally stored program. Built in 1949, the EDSAC used a mercury delay line memory. He is also known as the author, with Wheeler and Gill, of a volume on "Preparation of Programs for Electronic Digital Computers" in 1951, in which program libraries were effectively introduced. — Maurice Wilkes

I enjoy biographies and whatnot. I'm also a fan of presidential libraries. I've visited quite a few of them, especially the more modern ones. — David Mandel

There wasn't a place I could think of that was more magical than a building bursting with books and stories and words ... — Lindsay Eland

Besides, I like libraries. It makes me feel comfortable and secure to have walls of words, beautiful and wise, all around me. — Roger Zelazny

The reflections and histories of men and women throughout the world are contained in books ... America's greatness is not only recorded in books, but it is also dependent upon each and every citizen being able to utilize public libraries. — Terence Cooke

You don't spend your life hanging around books without learning a thing or two. — Lemony Snicket

As president of the American Historical Association, I started a programme to make dissertations into e-books in 1999. Before I knew it, I was involved in other electronic projects. Harvard invited me to become director of the libraries in 2007. — Robert Darnton

With a library it is easier to hope for serendipity than to look for a precise answer. — Lemony Snicket

Late fees are the enemy of early literacy because instead of promoting responsible behavior, they suppress library visits for some of the people who need the institution the most. And of course these fees don't promote children being more responsible, but only reveal to children how irresponsible, ignorant, or unaware their own parents are. -- Amy Dickinson — Kyle Cassidy

More is got from one book on which the thought settles for a definite end in knowledge, than from libraries skimmed over by a wandering eye. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

Early in my publishing career, someone told me I'd need to have five books in print before I could quit my job as a journalist. Turns out it was closer to 10 books. It also turns out that while it's great to see my titles on bookstore shelves, my best customers are schools and libraries. — Kate Klise

I am a bookworm. For play, I bury myself in the corners of libraries and read. — Robert Littell

My grandma always said that God made libraries so that people didn't have any excuse to be stupid. — Joan Bauer

My parents didn't know much science; in fact, they didn't know science at all. But they could recognize a science book when they saw it, and they spent a lot of time at bookstores, combing the remainder tables for science books to buy for me. I had one of the biggest libraries of any kid in school, built on books that cost 50 cents or a dollar. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse. — Barbara Tuchman

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

We should do our best to satisfy your interests in stories and books and the world. There are libraries. — Neil Gaiman

A society - any society - is defined as a set of mutual benefits and duties embodied most visibly in public institutions: public schools, public libraries, public transportation, public hospitals, public parks, public museums, public recreation, public universities, and so on. — Robert Reich

So she retreated into herself, rebuilt the damaged pathways of her mind, explored long-unvisited memories, wandered among the trillions of human lives that were open to her observation, read over the libraries of every book known to exist in every language human beings had ever spoken. She created out of all this a self that was not utterly linked to Ender Wiggin, though she was still devoted to him, still loved him above any other living soul. Jane made herself into someone who could bear to be cut off from her lover, husband, father, child, brother, friend. — Orson Scott Card

It happens to us once or twice in a lifetime to be drunk with some book which probably has some extraordinary relative power to intoxicate us and none other; and having exhausted that cup of enchantment we go groping in libraries all our years afterwards in the hope of being in Paradise again. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

I remember as a very young child being warned that libraries and bookstores were quiet places where noise wasn't allowed. Here was yet another thing the adults had gotten wrong, for these book houses pulsed with sounds; they just weren't noisy. The books hummed. The collective noise they made was like riding on a large boat where the motor's steady thrum and tickle vibrated below one's sneakers, ignorable until you listened, then omnipresent and relentless, the sound that carried you forward. Each book brimmed with noises it wanted to make inside your head the moment you opened it; only the shut covers prevented it from shouting ideas, impulses, proverbs, and plots into that sterile silence. — Wendy Welch

Imagine the people who believe such things and who are not ashamed to ignore, totally, all the patient findings of thinking minds through all the centuries since the Bible was written. And it is these ignorant people, the most uneducated, the most unimaginative, the most unthinking among us, who would make themselves the guides and leaders of us all; who would force their feeble and childish beliefs on us; who would invade our schools and libraries and homes. I personally resent it bitterly. — Isaac Asimov

An ancient mustiness padded the air, tinged with with an acrid scent-a trace of the war between paper and oxygen, played out in slow inexorable burn that would one day crumble this empire to dust. -page 62 — Jennifer Lee Carrell

As adults we choose our own reading material. Depending on our moods and needs we might read the newspaper, a blockbuster novel, an academic article, a women's magazine, a comic, a children's book, or the latest book that just about everyone is reading. No one chastises us for our choice. No one says, 'That's too short for you to read.' No one says, 'That's too easy for you, put it back.' No one says 'You couldn't read that if you tried
it's much too difficult.'
Yet if we take a peek into classrooms, libraries, and bookshops we will notice that children's choices are often mocked, censured, and denied as valid by idiotic, interfering teachers, librarians, and parents. Choice is a personal matter that changes with experience, changes with mood, and changes with need. We should let it be. — Mem Fox

For the mind and the imagination, bookstores aren't enough, college courses aren't enough, the Internet isn't enough. Those resources are all governed by the tastes and needs of the moment. Only libraries take the long view, quietly shelving the unused with the used, knowing that one of these days the two categories will be reversed by a student's discovery of those hitherto undisturbed volumes whose contents will unsettle the learned world. — Helen Vendler

I exercised my mental muscles in the library, and lo and behold, I transformed myself from a casual reader into a focused one. So it was more than just free books, but also free space and a culture that reinforced settling down, deep reading, thinking, imagining, and exploring with my mind. I am no doubt a writer today because I had a place to go as a kid, where I knew stories were essential, and where everybody also reveled in the wonder within books. — Sergio Troncoso

I care about a lot of issues. I care about libraries, I care about healthcare, I care about homelessness and unemployment. I care about net neutrality and the steady erosion of our liberties both online and off. I care about the rich/poor divide and the rise of corporate business. — Sara Sheridan

Libraries remind us that truth isn't about who yells the loudest, but who has the right information. Because even as we're the most religious of people, America's innovative genius has always been preserved because we also have a deep faith in facts. — Barack Obama

It's funny that we think of libraries as quiet demure places where we are shushed by dusty, bun-balancing, bespectacled women. The truth is libraries are raucous clubhouses for free speech, controversy and community. Librarians have stood up to the Patriot Act, sat down with noisy toddlers and reached out to illiterate adults. Libraries can never be shushed. — Paula Poundstone

Shut not your doors to me proud libraries. — Walt Whitman

Libraries are about books. Books have no color. And they don't care who reads them. — Augusta Scattergood

Schools across India do not have teachers, libraries, playing grounds and even toilets. I do not want to see empty classrooms, empty libraries. I do not want to see cattle grazing on fields meant to be cricket or football grounds. — Sachin Tendulkar

Between 1870 and 1905 Mark Twain (Samuel L. Clemens) tried repeatedly, and at long intervals, to write (or dictate) his autobiography, always shelving the manuscript before he had made much progress. By 1905 he had accumulated some thirty or forty of these false starts - manuscripts that were essentially experiments, drafts of episodes and chapters; many of these have survived in the Mark Twain Papers and two other libraries. To some of these manuscripts he went so far as to assign chapter numbers that placed them early or late in a narrative which he never filled in, let alone completed. None dealt with more than brief snatches of his life story. — Mark Twain

Public libraries are the sole community centers left in America. The degree to which a branch of the local library is connected to the larger culture is a reflection of the degree to which the community itself is connected to the larger culture. — Russell Banks

Elizabeth sank into the leather wing chair in the library of her mind and began to read. — L.J.M. Owen

I hate libraries for the way they put stickers on things. I don't approve of folding over pages, or of writing in books. And scissors - that's beyond the pale. — Jonathan Lethem

Bookstores, like libraries, are the physical manifestation of the wide world's longest, most thrilling conversation. — Richard Russo

The justices have constitutionally protected obscenity in libraries, filth over cable television, and now unlimited internet pornography. — Phyllis Schlafly

America's libraries are the fruits of a great democracy. They exist because we believe that memory and truth are important. They exists because we believe that information an knowledge are not the exclusive domain of a certain type or class of person but rather the province of all who seek to learn. A democratic society holds these institutions in high regard. — Robert S Martin

The library is like a candy store where everything is free. — Jamie Ford

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

A public library is the most enduring of memorials, the trustiest monument for the preservation of an event or a name or an affection; for it, and it only, is respected by wars and revolutions, and survives them.
[Letter to the Millicent (Rogers) Library, February 22, 1894] — Mark Twain

We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don't like federal agents poking around our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and have gay friends in the Red States. — Barack Obama

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

The librarian was explaining the benefits of the Dewey decimal system to her junior - benefits that extended to every area of life. It was orderly, like the universe. It had logic. It was dependable. Using it allowed a kind of moral uplift, as one's own chaos was also brought under control.
'Whenever I am troubled,' said the librarian, 'I think about the Dewey decimal system.'
'Then what happens?' asked the junior, rather overawed.
'Then I understand that trouble is just something that has been filed in the wrong place. That is what Jung was explaining of course - as the chaos of our unconscious contents strive to find their rightful place in the index of consciousness. — Jeanette Winterson

I have no ideas, myself! Not a one! there's nothing more vulgar, more common, more disgusting than ideas! libraries are loaded with them! and every sidewalk cafe! ... the impotent are bloated with ideas! ... they dazzle youth with ideas! they play the pimp! ... and youth is ever ready, as you know, Professor, to gobble up anything, to go OOH! and AAH! by the numbers! How those pimps have an easy job of it! the passionate years of youth are spent getting a hard on and gargling ideeaas! ... philosophies, if you prefer! ... yes sir, philosophies! youth loves sham just as young dogs love those sticks, like bones, that we throw and they run after! they race forward, yipping away, wasting their time, that's the main thing! — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

Book lovers love books!" her mother announced. "There's romance about the books- even having them seems to have a kind of excitement."
from Mr. Linden's Library by Walter Dean Myers — Chris Van Allsburg