Quotes & Sayings About Library Walls

The room was a compact, informal library. Books stood or were stacked on the shelves that ran along two walls from floor to ceiling, sat on the tables like knickknacks, trooped around the room like soldiers. They struck Malory as more than knowledge or entertainment, even more than stories or information. They were colour and texture, in a haphazard yet somehow intricate decorating scheme.
The short leg of the L-shaped room boasted still more books, as well as a small table that held the remains of Dana's breakfast.
With her hands on her hips, Dana watched Malory's perusal of her space. She'd seen the reaction before. 'No I haven't read them all, but I will.And no I don't know how many I have. Want coffee?'
Let me just ask this. Do you ever actually use the services of the library?'
Sure, but I need to own them. If I don't have twenty or thirty books right here, waiting to be read, I start jonesing. That's my compulsion. — Nora Roberts

I emerge into a library/study with the highest book population density I have ever come across. Book walls, book towers, book avenues, book side streets. Book spillages, book rubble. Papperback books, hardback books, atlases, manuals, almanacs. Nine lifetimes of books. Enough books to build an igloo to hide in. The room is sentient with books. Mirrors double and cube the books. A Great Wall of China quantity of books. Enough books to makes me wonder if I am a book too. — David Mitchell

Read a verse of Homer and you can walk the walls of Troy alongside Hector; fall into a paragraph by Fitzgerald and your Now entangles with Gatsby's Now; open a 1953 book by Ray Bradbury and go hunting T. rexes. Ursula Le Guin said: "Story is our only boat for sailing on the river of time," and she's right, of course. The shelves of every library in the world brim with time machines. Step into one, and off you go. — Anthony Doerr

I'm rarely at a loss for words outside the library. But within its walls I'm required to form sentences that no logical person should ever have to utter, for instance, You can't sleep on the floor at the library under your blanket. — Josh Hanagarne

My interior is very, very dense - Proustian-looking, sort of Henry James. The walls are covered in pictures, and I transformed the big drawing room into a library lined with books. — Hamish Bowles

I was happy in the library. Walls of printed pages, evidence of so many created worlds
this was a comfort to me. — Alice Munro

Look at the way the walls curve,' Macey said, her gaze panning around the strangely shaped room. 'it's almost like ... '
'The library,' Liz said, and immediately I knew that she was right. It was exactly like the library at the Gallagher Academy, from the position of the fireplace to the tall windows that overlooked the grounds.
'How do you know?' Zach asked.
Liz looked totally insulted. 'Because ... uh ... library.'
'Okay.' Zach threw up his hands. 'Point taken. — Ally Carter

About the library," he whispered. He took out the pencil stub from his pocket and poised it over the page.
"Will you write like Mr. Blake or like yourself?" I inquired.
He wrote and whispered the words aloud as he did. "I am in the library. It smells like old stuff."
"It smells familiar," I suggested. "It smells like words." Because his left side was to me, I couldn't easily take his hand to write.
"Books are boring," James said as he wrote.
"They line the walls like a thousand leather doorways to be opened into worlds unknown," I offered.
He thought about this and then wrote with a smile, "I hate books. — Laura Whitcomb

Throughout my formal education I spent many, many hours in public and school libraries. Libraries became courts of last resort, as it were. The current definitive answer to almost any question can be found within the four walls of most libraries. — Arthur Ashe

Those afternoons in the library, breathing the stale sun-warmed dust of a thousand stories (accented by the collective mildew of a hundred years of rising damp), had been enchanted. Two decades ago now, and yet here, on the No. 168 bus towards Hampstead Heath, Peter was beset with an almost bodily sense of being back there. His lips twitched with the memory of being nine years old and lanky as a foal. His mood lifted as he remembered how large, how filled with possibilities, and yet, at once, how safe and navigable the world had seemed when he was shut within those four walls . — Kate Morton

Poppy used to share the room with her older sister, and piles of he sister's outgrown clothes still remained spread out in drifts, along with a collection of used makeup and notebooks covered in stickers and scrawled with lyrics. A jumbled of her sister's old Barbies were on top of a bookshelf, waiting for Poppy to try and fix their melted arms and chopped hair. The bookshelves were overflowing with fantasy paperbacks and overdue library books, some of them on Greek myths, some on mermaids, and a few on local hauntings. The walls were covered in posters-Doctor Who, a cat in a bowler hat, and a giant map of Narnia. — Holly Black

My mother lived alone in the ruins of the great Library, which was called Compleat, and a very passionate and dashing Library indeed. Under the slightly blackened rafters and more than slightly caved-in walls, my mother lived and read and dreamed, allowing herself to grow closer and closer to Compleat, to notice more and more how fine and straight his shelves remained, despite great structural stress. That sort of moral fortitude is rare in this day and age. By and by, my siblings and I were born and romped on the balconies, raced up and down the splintered ladders, and pored over many encyclopedias and exciting novels. I know just everything about everything - so long as it beings with A through L. — Catherynne M Valente

He had loved the library, and had felt, as a boy, as though it had a kind of sentience, and perhaps loved him back. But even if it was just walls and a roof with papers inside, it had bewitched him, and drawn him in, and given him everything he needed to become himself. — Laini Taylor

As music migrates into our iPods, CD collections require less and less room, residing in our heads rather than resounding off the walls. The protracted labor of amassing a personal music library has lost its detective zeal. — James Wolcott

Prolific libraries take on an independent existence, and become living things ... We may have chosen its themes, and the general pathways along which it will develop, but we can only stand and watch as it invades all the walls of the room, climbs to the ceiling, annexes the other rooms one by one, expelling anything that gets in the way. It eliminates pictures hanging on the walls, or ornaments that obstruct its advance; it moves on with its necessary but cumbersome acolytes
stools and ladders
and forces its owner into constant reorganization since its progress is not linear and calls for ever new kinds of diviion. At the same time, it is undeniably the reflection, the twin image of its master. To anyone with the insight to decode it, the fundamental character of the librarian will emerge as one's eye travels along the bookshelves. indeed no library of any size is like another, none has the same personality. (pp. 30-31) — Jacques Bonnet

The restaurant was waning, indifferently relaxing its illusion: for the late-comers a private illusion took its place. Their table seemed to stand on their own carpet; they had a sensation of custom, sedateness, of being inside small walls, as though dining at home again after her journey. She told him about her Mount Morris solitary suppers, in the middle of the library, the rim of the tray just not touching the base of the lamp ... the fire behind her back softly falling in on its own ash-no it had not been possible to feel lonely among those feeling things. — Elizabeth Bowen

There was a library and it is ashes. Let its long length assemble. Than its stone walls its paper walls are thicker; armoured with learning, with philosophy, with poetry that drifts or dances clamped though it is in midnight. Shielded with flax and calfskin and a cold weight of ink, there broods the ghost of Sepulchrave, the melancholy Earl, seventy-sixth lord of half-light. — Mervyn Peake

Her library filled her bookshelves and then overflowed into waist-high stacks of books everywhere, piled haphazardly against the walls. If just one of them moved ... the domino effect could engulf the three of us in an asphyxiating mass of literature. — John Green

His sisters
my aunts
did not go to school at all, just like millions of girls in my country. Education had been a great gift for him. He believed that lack of education was the root of all of Pakistan's problems. Ignorance allowed politicians to fool people and bad administrators to be re-elected. He believed schooling should be available for all, rich and poor, boys and girls. The school that my father dreamed of would have desks and a library, computers, bright posters on the walls and, most important, washrooms. — Malala Yousafzai

The chief difference between big-game fishing and weightlifting is that weightlifters never clutter up their library walls with stuffed barbells — Ed Zern

Actually the contents of these books mattered little. What did matter was what they first felt when they went into the library, where they would see not the walls of black books but multiplying horizons and expanses that, as soon as they crossed the doorstep, would take them away from the cramped life of the neighbourhood. — Albert Camus

The public library building, in my view, is just a little lower than the church, the cathedral, the temple, the synagogue and the mosque. Within those walls and along those stacks, I have found security and assurance. — Maya Angelou

Bookshelves stood against the four walls. They were shapely and well made, but were all second-hand; Hetty had picked them up on visits to Chesterbourne. She liked her shelves to have personality, as well as the books on them, and thought it would have been simpler to order shelves to be fitted around the room, or to buy those bookcases that grow with the growth of their library, she had stood firm against the amusement of Victor and the irritation of her aunt, and had the shelves she wanted. — Stella Gibbons

We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library, whose walls are covered to the ceiling with books in many different languages. The child knows that someone must have written those books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the the languages in which they are written. The child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books, a mysterious order, which it does not comprehend but only dimly suspects. — Albert Einstein

The student has his Rome, his whole glowing Italy, within the four walls of his library. He has in his books the ruins of an antique world and the glories of a modern one. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

She threw the door open. The room seemed to be a sort of library, the walls lined with books. It was brightly lit, light streaming through a tall picture window. In the middle of the room stood Jace. He wasn't alone, though-not by a long shot. There was a dark-haired girl with him, a girl Clary had never seen before, and the two of them were locked together in a passionate embrace — Cassandra Clare

Yes, when I get big and have my own home, no plush chairs and lace curtains for me. And no rubber plants. I'll have a desk like this in my parlor and white walls and a clean green blotter every Sunday night and a row of shining yellow pencils always sharpened for writing and a golden-brown bowl with a flower or some leaves or berries always in it and books ... books..books. — Betty Smith

The library would've cheered me up, most days. I loved the heavy oaken tables, the high walls stacked with books to the ceiling, the musty smell of old pages and the heavy brass fixtures that had gone dark with age and wear. — Claudia Gray