Library Libraries Quotes & Sayings

Libraries are a force for good. They wear capes. They fight evil. They don't get upset when you don't send them a card on their birthdays. (Though they will charge you if you're late returning a book.) They serve communities. The town without a library is a town without a soul. The library card is a passport to wonders and miracles, glimpses into other lives, religions, experiences, the hopes and dreams and strivings of ALL human beings, and it is this passport that opens our eyes and hearts to the world beyond our front doors, that is one of our best hopes against tyranny, xenophobia, hopelessness, despair, anarchy, and ignorance. Libraries are the torch of the world, illuminating the path when it feels too dark to see. We mustn't allow that torch to be extinguished. — Libba Bray

A good library will never be too neat, or too dusty, because somebody will always be in it, taking books off the shelves and staying up late reading them. — Lemony Snicket

Organizing the books was a fun afternoon. We decided to put the thick hardback books, mostly intro. to philosophy textbooks and Norton literature anthologies, on the top shelves where they looked good but stayed out of reach since there's no reason for opening them ever again. Then we went by genre: mysteries, cozies, modernists, mountains, sci-fi, beloved childhood volumes, books we bought abroad, books required in school we couldn't sell back, books bought for us we'll read soon, books bought for us we have no intention of reading, books we want to read but are too long for a commitment with our current schedules...We're not really done with this organization, and I doubt we ever will be, but that's one great part about it. — Joshua Isard

Books had become a symbol of trust and libraries places of peace and stability. In all the chaos of the world that counted people as different levels of worthy, the Library served all equally. All genders, races, levels of ability. It was the one place they could all be safe, p195 — Rachel Caine

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

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

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

I want to know how the hell you managed to locate that hideout using the damn public library. — Richard Castle

When you steal from the library, you are preventing anyone else from reading that book, and the very notion makes me want to drop you in the Void. — Piers Anthony

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

The library was a great sprawling complex with rolls and rolls of paper tucked into many shelves. Between the reading rooms were courtyards with living fountains and singing birds and butterflies that would transform into handsome young women to guide or entertain anyone who stayed there any length of time. I saw one among the stacks, explaining an older style of calligraphy to the newly appointed Heavenly Marine Official of the South China Sea. In another wing, a librarian stepped from her chrysalis for the first time, reciting T'ang Dynasty poetry to the flowers. That's how I knew I was in the right section. — Larissa Lai

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

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 do a lot of research for my books. I can't possibly know all the things I write about and I love learning new things. I spend hours and hours doing research in books, libraries and online. [Once] I traveled to the reservation to get the settings and the flavor of the place down right. — Linda Conrad

Our sense that a library is a public good and our idea of what such a place should look like derived precisely from a model created in Rome several thousand years ago. — Stephen Greenblatt

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

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

Bars are closed on Election Day so people won't vote under the influence. Why are libraries closed? — Arthur D. Hlavaty

When I get nervous, I go to the library and hang around. The libraries are filled with people who are nervous. You can blend in with them there. You're bound to see someone more nervous than you are in a library. Sometimes the librarians themselves are more nervous than you are. I'll probably be a librarian for that reason. Then if I'm nervous on the job, it won't show. I'll just stamp books and look things up for people and run back and forth to the staff room sneaking smokes until I get hold of myself. A library is a great place to hid. — M.E. Kerr

The boy was a model pupil, forgettable and easily forgotten, and he sent much of his spare time in the back of the English class where there were shelves of old paperbacks, and in the school library, a large room filled with books and old armchairs, where he read stories as enthusiastically as some children ate. — Neil Gaiman

Libraries never let us forget who we are, for their worth stands by the knowledge they keep and save for us. — Virginia Hamilton

Libraries are a consistent and major source of books for free reading. — Stephen D. Krashen

Libraries can in general be too narrow or too wide for the soul. — Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Entering a library, I am always stuck by the way in which a certain vision of the world is imposed upon the reader through its categories and its order. — Alberto Manguel

My Alma mater is the Chicago Public Library. — David Mamet

Don't mark up the Library's copy, you fool! Librarians are Unprankable. They'll track you down! They have skills! — Charles Ogden

I grew up in a utopia, I did. California when I was a child was a child's paradise, I was healthy, well fed, well clothed, well housed. I went to school and there were libraries with all the world in them and after school I played in orange groves and in Little League and in the band and down at the beach and every day was an adventure ... I grew up in utopia. — Kim Stanley Robinson

Libraries have always been humanities' way of preserving its collective wisdom — Umberto Eco

The historical principles of librarianship - universal access to information, individual privacy, freedom of expression, and truth above all else - are as necessary now as they have ever been and must persist. At the same time, the balance of library leadership needs to swing more forcefully toward the new or libraries will fade in their significance to the American public. — John Palfrey

Libraries can be of indispensable service in lifting the dead weight of poverty and ignorance. — Francis Keppel

Society was the only threat to the sanctity of selfhood: an unpatroned library was an orderly library. — Reif Larsen

A single charitable foundation started by one capitalist does more good than a world full of socialists and leftists. Think Carnegie and his libraries, or Sloan and Kettering their hospital, or Gates in Africa. — James Cook

Libraries have a PR problem - or at least that's what they call it when no one under the age of 40 walks through the door. To bring in a younger crowd, the paper pushers have turned to tech to bring in the public. DVDs, CDs and, yes, even videogames are hitting the shelves of your local library. — Rob Manuel

She wore heavy sandals, with socks. No kid in the entire state of Mississippi wore black socks in the summer. Shoot, if I wasn't standing smack-dab in the middle of the library, I wouldn't be wearing shoes. — Augusta Scattergood

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

We all love to hear a good story. We save our stories in books. We save our books in libraries. Libraries are the storyhouses full of all those stories and secrets. — Kathy Bates

Defending the library service from the predations of ideologically-motivated public schoolboys who had immensely privileged childhoods isn't 'whining,' it is the pursuit of passionately held beliefs. — Alan Gibson

Film, television and to a certain extent, theater are modern day libraries. — David Strathairn

Great. He was a hottie, a good kisser, and a literature buff. God really must have had a sense of humor, because if I had to name my biggest turn-on, it was literature. And he had just recommended a book that I didn't know, that wasn't taught in school. If I were single, there would be no better pick-up line. Suddenly, I found myself thinking back to Atonement - you know, the scene in the book where the two main characters have sex in the library? Even though Chloe said doing it against bookshelves would be really uncomfortable (and she'd probably know), it was still a fantasy of mine. Like, what's more romantic than a quiet place full of books? But I shouldn't have been thinking about my library fantasies. Especially while I was staring at Cash. In the middle of a library. — Kody Keplinger

Knowing I lov'd my books, he furnish'd me From mine own library with volumes that I prize above my dukedom. — William Shakespeare

Libraries and museums are the DNA of our culture. — Vartan Gregorian

Walking the stacks in a library, dragging your fingers across the spines
it's hard not to feel the presence of sleeping spirits. — Robin Sloan

Most people don't understand what a library does for me and I've tried to explain it to them. All I know is that I feel energized when I'm in one. My pulse quickens when I walk through the the stacks. I feel like an explorer surveying an uncharted shore. Lost worlds are here waiting to be discovered. Ancient worlds; once glorious, not crumbled. Future worlds; no more substantial than the numbers or ideas or words of those who dream them. Mythical worlds. Worlds of limitless dimensions.
Libraries are medieval forests masking opportunity and danger; every aisle is a path, every catalog reference a clue to the location of the Holy Grail. — Jack Cavanaugh

I have become convinced that we blacks spend too much time on the playing field and too little time in libraries. — Arthur Ashe

Libraries, have always seemed to me pleasantly mad places, and for as long as I can remember I've been seduced by their labyrinthine logic. - The Library at Night — Alberto Manguel

If you cut funding to libraries, you cut the lifeblood of our communities. — Richard M. Daley

I was born, and then I was quietly resentful of that fact for a few years ... but then I went to a library and it was okay. — Helen Oyeyemi

Libraries are where most of us really fall in love with books, where we can browse and choose on our own. Its really one of the first autonomous things we do, picking the books we want to read. — Kim Boykin

It is fascinating that Baghdad had more than 100 public libraries in the year 891, Cordoba had 70 public libraries at the end of 10th century, while the royal library of Caliph al-'Aziz, in the year 988, of the Fatimids in Cairo perhaps had more than 100,000 volumes collection arranged in classified order. — Balqis Suja'

In 2002, Google began an ambitious project to digitize every book in the world. It was intended as a search project: type in a query, and Google would show you snippets. They asked university libraries for books, which they would scan for free. At Harvard we didn't permit them to take works under copyright, but other libraries gave them everything. — Robert Darnton

We were all serious readers, sitting on wooden chairs at rows of lecterns, turning the pages, united in mutual love of isolation. — Michael Moorcock

Theory is a dirty word in some managerial quarters. That is rather curious, because all of us, managers especially, can no more get along without theories than libraries can get along without catalogs and for the same reason: theories help us make sense of incoming information. — Henry Mintzberg

The point is not that books, magazines, and DVDs are dead - far from it. At places such as the redesigned Boston Public Library, popular publications and media materials in physical form circulate rapidly from prominent spaces close to the building's entrance. The point is that people's information habits have undergone a sea change - a major shift toward the digital. Libraries are trying to serve a wide range of patrons at many different points along an "adoption curve," with all-print at one end and all-digital at the other. — John Palfrey

My two favourite things in life are libraries and bicycles. They both move people forward without wasting anything. The perfect day: riding a bike to the library. — Peter Golkin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A library is a place to go for a reality check, a bracing dose of literature, or a "true reflection of our history," whether it's a brick-and-mortar building constructed a century ago or a fanciful arrangement of computer codes. The librarian is the organizer, the animating spirit behind it, and the navigator. Her job is to create order out of the confusion of the past, even as she enables us to blast into the future. — Marilyn Johnson

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

The love of libraries, like most loves, must be learned. — Alberto Manguel

In my view, investing in public libraries is an investment in the nation's future. — Bill Gates

Know something about the world, and by this I mean the world outside of books. This might require joining the Marines, or working on an oil rig or as a hash slinger at a truck stop in Kentucky. Know what it smells like out there. If everything you write smells like a library, then your prospective audience will be limited to those who like the smell of libraries. — Douglas Wilson

Libraries made me - as a reader, as a writer, and as a human being. — Laurie R. King

Libraries
Are
Neccessary
Gardens,
Unsurpassed
At
Growing
Excitement — J. Patrick Lewis

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

The truth is libraries are raucous clubhouses for free speech, controversy and community. — Paula Poundstone

I don't think people realise how vital libraries are or what a colossal danger it would be if we were to lose any more. Having had a truncated school life myself, all of my education from the age of 17 has been self-taught. I wouldn't be the person I am today if it wasn't for the opportunities the library gave me. — Alan Moore

I'm still old-fashioned. I love dusty old books and libraries. — Harper Lee

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

I want to have schools and libraries and other institutions named after me. I tell my daughter that all the time. — Kam Williams

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

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

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