School Library Quotes & Sayings

The non-jocks, the readers, the gay kids, the ones starting to stew about social injustice: for these kids, "letting your freak flag fly" is both self discovery and self defense. You cry for this bunch at the mandatory pep assemblies. Huddled together, miserably, in the upper reaches of the bleachers, wearing their oversized raincoats and their secondhand Salvation Army clothes, they stare down at the school-sanctioned celebration of the A list students. They know bullying, these kids
especially the ones who frefuse to exist under the radar. They're tripped in the hallway, shoved against lockers, pelted with Skittles in the lunchroom. For the most part, their tormentors are stealth artists.
The freaks know where there's refuge: I the library, the theater program, art class, creative writing. — Wally Lamb

She hated everything. The library with its pile of books full of explanations about life; the school that had forced her to spend whole evenings learning algebra, even though she didn't know a single person, apart from teachers and mathematicians, who needed algebra in order to be happy. — Paulo Coelho

Do you know that if you take the books in an average school library and stretched out all those words into a single line, the line would go all the way around the world? Actually, I made that up, but doesn't it sound like it should be true? — Neal Shusterman

You can't stay in the library all day!" I hiss, sitting next to him.
"This is a school. Studying is encouraged."
"What exactly are you studying?"
He folds the paper and gives me his cat grin. "History students. — Kiersten White

There are children on the island who go barefoot all summer and wear feathers in their hair, the Volkswagen vans in which their parents arrived in the '70s turning to rust in the forest. Every year there are approximately two hundred days of rain. There's a village of sorts by the ferry terminal: a general store with one gas pump, a health-food store, a real-estate office, an elementary school with sixty students, a community hall with two massive carved mermaids holding hands to form an archway over the front door and a tiny library attached. The rest of the island is mostly rock and forest, narrow roads with dirt driveways disappearing into the trees. — Emily St. John Mandel

Open the book and read it to renew your mind. — Lailah Gifty Akita

I once called construction companies to bid on an addition to the school library so that there would suddenly be people outside, measuring the building. 'Who authorized this?' the principal would ask. The answer: 'Howie Mandel.' — Howie Mandel

This is shitty to say, but there's not much pathos involved in a case like that. Think about it: Little So-and-so the Fourth drowns himself Tuesday night after receiving his midterm grades in the school of civil engineering. The body goes back to Westchester, and a lounge in the library or a nature path gets named after him, and a bunch of blue-blood kids remember him fondly. Sorry. There's about one story a year like that. Poor Billy Fuckup, Jr., in his Gap khakis, the pressure of going to classes all day really got to him. If I were a better person, I would have felt badly having seen things like that. — Cara Hoffman

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

I grew up in rural Tennessee. There were no bookstores in the town, but the school had a little library, and the town had a little library, each with a patient and enthusiastic librarian, and I raced into both as if they were doorways to another world. — Michael Sims

I received the fundamentals of my education in school, but that was not enough. My real education, the superstructure, the details, the true architecture, I got out of the public library. For an impoverished child whose family could not afford to buy books, the library was the open door to wonder and achievement, and I can never be sufficiently grateful that I had the wit to charge through that door and make the most of it. Now, when I read constantly about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that the door is closing and that American society has found one more way to destroy itself. — Isaac Asimov

The library of my elementary school had this great biography section, and I read all of these paperback biographies until they were dog-eared. The story of Eleanor Roosevelt and Madame Curie and Martin Luther King and George Washington Carver and on and on and on. — Christine Quinn

...my colleagues upstairs, in their huge ground floor space with their big windows and perfectly ordered shelves, they're so comfortable sitting there alongside their coffee machines, that they actually talk out loud about how nice it would be in a library without readers. Like some teacher's dream of a school with no pupils. But what would be the point of us then? Oh, yes, it would be in perfect order. A mathematical masterpiece, really shipshape, our library. But what would be the point if nobody came along to disturb it? ...that's all I do want, to be asked a question, to be disturbed, just a bit. — Sophie Divry

Every child in American should have access to a well-stocked school library. — Laura Bush

I was a library rat and a bookworm. I read all the time. I walked to school reading books. I read under my desk. — Chelsea Cain

We give scholarships to high school kids and a new library of books to every preschool child in the county where I was born. I didn't have books at home so I did all my reading at school. I love books and I believe that helping kids to read gives them a great start in life. — Dolly Parton

The idea of education has been so tied to schools, universities, and professors that many assume there is no other way, but education is available to anyone within reach of a library, a post office, or even a newsstand. — Louis L'Amour

I took out my first library card ... I spent most of my Saturdays at the library (no interruptions) breathing in the world of penniless shoeshine boys who, with goodness and perseverance, became rich, rich men, and gave baskets of goodies to the poor on holidays. The little princesses who were mistaken for maids, and the long-lost children mistaken for waifs, became more real to me than our house, our mother, our school or Mr. Freeman — Maya Angelou

In seventh grade, with some vague sense that I wanted to be a writer, I crouched in the junior high school library stacks to see where my novels would eventually be filed. It was right after someone named Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. So I grabbed a Vonnegut book, 'Breakfast of Champions' and immediately fell in love. — Jess Walter

He reads every book in his home but it is not enough. The country boy craves stories. He devours every poem and fable in his school and library. Still he hungers. For stories. — Jennifer Lanthier

I was fortunate to attend a school with an excellent library — Syrie James

I discovered Deborah Ellis's books in the school library after my head teacher encouraged me to go beyond the school curriculum and look for books I might enjoy. — Malala Yousafzai

I always tell people that I became a writer not because I went to school but because my mother took me to the library. I wanted to become a writer so I could see my name in the card catalog. — Sandra Cisneros

I once stole a book. It was really just the once, and at the time I called it borrowing. It was 1970, and the book, I could see by its lack of date stamps, had been lying unappreciated on the shelves of my convent school library since its publication in 1945. — Hilary Mantel

When I tell people I went to library school, the most common reaction is either "You're joking, right?" or "They have schools for librarians? Do they teach you how to properly sssh people? — Scott Douglas

If it is right that schools should be maintained by the whole community for the well-being of the whole, it is right also that libraries should be so maintained. — Andrew Carnegie

The national school is not a lecture hall or a library. Its schooling consists chiefly in experimental collective action aimed at the realization of a collective purpose. — Herbert Croly

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

It is an awfully sad misconception that librarians simply check books in and out. The library is the heart of a school, and without a librarian, it is but an empty shell. — Jarrett J. Krosoczka

I spent all my time at school in the library. Bad teachers can teach you to learn on your own. — Gregory Colbert

I was a big reader. I could spend whole days absorbed in a book, whole weekends in the library or the park, completely oblivious to my surroundings. 'Escapism', I suppose they'd call it, but I never really liked that term much myself. I mean, who is it exactly who gets to decide which parts of your life are real and which parts are only allowed to count as an escape from that reality? I preferred to think that good books were my real life and all the other stuff - school, chores, all the rest of it - was just an interruption. — Jess Vallance

He kissed me for a long moment, holding my shoulders, perhaps to keep me from pressing my whole body against his. Then he tried to lift my bag.
"My God," he said. "What happened?"
"I found out one may check out twenty books at a time from the school library. — Laura Whitcomb

Fourteen is the age when time first starts to make its presence felt. Time took on such a variety of hues in those days that even my frozen mind sometimes reflected the colours of the world around me, and I could feel my thoughts fluttering in the humid, salty breeze. At such moments, when the brilliant blue skies, the flaming carpets beneath the Gulmohur trees in the school grounds and the nut-brown twinkle in Sonia's eyes splashed into the moments of my life, I felt alive. Only time had no colour in the library. In the library, time simply ceased to be. — Indu Muralidharan

The library was open for one hour after school let out. I hid there, looking at art books and reading poetry. — Lynda Barry

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

My first contact with game theory was a popular article in 'Fortune Magazine' which I read in my last high school year. I was immediately attracted to the subject matter, and when I studied mathematics, I found the fundamental book by von Neumann and Morgenstern in the library and studied it. — Reinhard Selten

But we're a university! We have to have a library!" said Ridcully. "It adds tone. What sort of people would we be if we didn't go into the library?"
"Students," said Senior Wrangler morosely. — Terry Pratchett

It is, however, not to the museum, or the lecture-room, or the drawing- school, but to the library, that we must go for the completion of our humanity. It is books that bear from age to age the intellectual wealth of the world. — Robert Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Earl Of Lytton

All the librarians turned their heads to me in a collective shush. "I'm afraid you have to survive library school, put up with the general public on a daily basis, and endure several years of budget cuts in order to deserve these drinks," Chris told me kindly. "But someday, Dash, all this will be yours! We know how to spot 'em, and you're a young, temporarily one-eyed librarian in the rough! — Rachel Cohn

Larger school library collections and longer hours increase circulation. — Stephen D. Krashen

The invention of "electronic ink" is just around the corner. This invention will enable the use of flexible paper-like devices to display electronic texts, thereby resolving the issue of using cumbersome, bulky electronic devices such as laptops and PDAs. Some day not so far in the future you will be able to carry around a newspaper in your briefcase that constantly updates itself wirelessly via the Internet. You will be able to carry a small "book" in your book bag that can call up the text not only for all of your classes in school, but also every book ever published (or at least digitized). Imagine - the entire Library of Congress in your book bag. — Scott Shay

The old man was peering intently at the shelves. 'I'll have to admit that he's a very competent scholar.'
Isn't he just a librarian?' Garion asked, 'somebody who looks after books?'
That's where all the rest of scholarship starts, Garion. All the books in the world won't help you if they're just piled up in a heap. — David Eddings

I like to engage the public because when I was in high school, I had all these questions about anti-matter, higher dimensions and time travel. Every time I went to the library, every time I asked people these questions, I would get some strange looks. Nobody could answer any of these questions. — Michio Kaku

She asked her parents to buy him the books she'd been read by her first teachers, Peter Rabbit and Frog and Toad. "What's the point of buying books for someone who can't read?" her parents asked, legitimately enough, and so she checked them out of her school library and read them to Rahul herself. — Jhumpa Lahiri

I remember I was in grade school, the fourth grade, in a free reading period in the library. Someone in my class found a copy of the Forbes 400, a list of the richest people in America, and my dad's name was on it. — Jamie Johnson

I wanted to be a great white hunter, a prospector for gold, or a slave trader. But then, when I was eight, my parents sent me to a boarding school in South Africa. It was the equivalent of a British public school with cold showers, beatings and rotten food. But what it also had was a library full of books. — Wilbur Smith

In library science school, back in the years of glowing green non-graphical screens and protocols called Archie and Veronica, I wrote Internet documentation. — Elizabeth McCracken

I like to imagine that library school was started because of some sort of silly bar bet where a guy got really plastered and told his buddy that he could convince people that librarians needed to be trained in the art of librarianship. Sadly, this is not the case; its roots are a bit more academic. — Scott Douglas

Daemon snatched the yellow packages from my hands. "Oh! Books! You have books!"
I laughed as several people waiting in line looked over their shoulders. "Hand them over."
He clutched them to his chest, making moony eyes. "My life is now complete."
"My life would be complete if I could actually post a review on something other than the school library computers."
I did that about twice a week since my latest laptop went to the big computer heaven in the sky. — Jennifer L. Armentrout

Beth had been a middle school science teacher and Joni was a librarian and they both had collections of weird stuff they had found. Bizarre, misspelled letters written by lovelorn eighth graders. Obscene Polaroids left in between the pages of library books. They used to call each other on the phone to share their latest discovery, and Critter had always remained a little off to the side, never feeling quite as sharp or ironic as they were. Critter was an electrician, primarily home repair, and so he didn't usually come across anything except bad wiring and faulty lighting fixtures. — Dan Chaon

My maternal grandmother - she was a compulsive reader. She had only been through five grades of elementary school, but she was a member of the municipal library, and she brought home two or three books a week for me. They could be dime novels or Balzac. — Umberto Eco

I never could read Foucault. I find philosophy tedious. All of my knowledge comes from reading novels and some history. I read Being and Nothingness and realized that I remembered absolutely nothing when I finished it. I used to go to the library every day and read every day for eight hours. I'd dropped out of high school and had to teach myself. I read Sartre without any background. I just forced myself and I learned nothing. — Michael Gira

... in the library ... surrounded by things far more dangerous than what roamed the school corridors. For here thoughts were housed. — Louise Penny

I don't believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don't have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn't go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years. — Ray Bradbury

It was 1953, and I was still at school. I'd borrowed a silent French film from the library for my 9.5mm projector. It was by Jean Epstein, and it was awful. So I rang the library and asked if they had anything else. They said they had 'Napoleon Bonaparte and the French Revolution.' — Kevin Brownlow

When I left home after graduating high school, I left as a migrant agricultural worker with a Modern Library edition of Plato in my duffel bag. It sounds kind of crazy, but I loved it. I loved the stuff. Before I knew there was a subject called philosophy, I loved it. — Dallas Willard

There's no use going to school unless your final destination is the library. — Ray Bradbury

Drake is my own personal suicide, and the sooner I except that, the sooner I can come to terms with my loner status at the school library — Addison Moore

It was sort of like being in one of those love-and-horror supernatural novels, the kind Mrs. Robinson in the school library sniffily called "tweenager porn." In those books the girls dallied with werewolves, vampires - even zombies - but hardly ever became those things. It was also nice to have a grown man stand up for her, and it didn't hurt that he was handsome, in a scruffy kind of way that reminded her a little of Jax Teller on Sons of Anarchy, a show she and Emma Deane secretly watched on Em's computer. — Stephen King

Community. A friend started a real estate brokerage a few years ago. By the time she'd added her second employee, she was a pillar of her 35,000-person community. No rule says that only the local banker or car dealer can organize the program to raise supplemental funds for the public library or send the high school band on a well-earned special trip. Participating in community affairs, with time more than dollars, is good business from day one. It gets your name around, adds to your distinctiveness, and, best of all, makes you an attractive employer (which is the key to sustained success). — Tom Peters

I got into Kiss before I got into anybody. The first thing I heard was 'Detroit Rock City.' I heard it in the school library, where I lived. — Brian Posehn

Drop out of school before your mind rots from exposure to our mediocre educational system. Forget about the Senior Prom and go to the library and educate yourself if you've got any guts. Some of you like Pep rallies and plastic robots who tell you what to read. — Frank Zappa

Trees constitute the environmental quality committee - running air and water purification service 24-7. They're on every task force, from the historical society picnic to the highway department, school board, and library. When it comes to civic beautification, they alone create the crimson fall with little recognition. — Robin Wall Kimmerer

I loved doing problems in school. I'd take them home and make up new ones of my own. But the best problem I ever found, I found in my local public library. I was just browsing through the section of math books and I found this one book, which was all about one particular problem - Fermat's Last Theorem. — Andrew Wiles

I started to go to the library, devouring every book I could lay my hands on. Once I began a book, I couldn't put it down. It was like an addiction; I read while I ate, on the train, in bed until late at night in school, where I'd keep the book hidden so I could read during class — Haruki Murakami

My necessities were books. I read a book at school, another to and from school, yet another at the beach, which was the closest escape from my father's dying. Though when I walked alone it was far. Though I wasn't allowed to walk alone when younger - so young that my concern wasn't the danger to myself but to the books I'd bring, because they weren't mine, they were everyone's, entrusted to me in return for exemplary behavior, and if I lost even a single book, or let even its corner get nicked by a jitney, the city would come, the city itself, and lock me up in that grim brick jail that, in every feature, resembled the library. — Joshua Cohen

From fifth grade on, I worked at our public library. The pay, a pittance, was almost superfluous. All through high school, I looked forward to summer as the time when I could work at the library four or five days a week. I was never a camp counselor, a lifeguard, a scooper of ice cream. — Julia Glass

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 taught myself more in the library than school taught me. — Terry Pratchett

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

In assembling this group of portraits of women, I'm aware that I'm treading on dangerous ground. When I was in college, I learned to be distrustful of men's depictions of women. I remember seeing Garry Winogrand's book Women Are Beautiful in the school library and being shocked that it hadn't been defaced for its blatant objectification of women. But looking back, maybe I was too harsh. Whether one photographs men or women, it is always a form of objectification. Whatever you say about Winogrand, his depiction was honest. — Alec Soth

My kids have grown up knowing that their mom made a big investment in making sure there was art and language instruction in school and books in the library. Hopefully, they've internalized that. — Elise Broach

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

My mother brought us to the library every week, and I read a lot. That's what kept me company. I went from school to school, but there was always reading. — Julianne Moore

When I was a schoolboy in England, the old bound volumes of Kipling in the library had gilt swastikas embossed on their covers. The symbol's 'hooks' were left-handed, as opposed to the right-handed ones of the Nazi hakenkreuz, but for a boy growing up after 1945 the shock of encountering the emblem at all was a memorable one. I later learned that in the mid-1930s Kipling had caused this 'signature' to be removed from all his future editions. Having initially sympathized with some of the early European fascist movements, he wanted to express his repudiation of Hitlerism (or 'the Hun,' as he would perhaps have preferred to say), and wanted no part in tainting the ancient Indian rune by association. In its origin it is a Hindu and Jainas symbol for light, and well worth rescuing. — Christopher Hitchens

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

I mean, for all of his faults and the troubles in his marriage, Bill Clinton is still married to a girl he met in the library 25 years ago at school. Can we say that about many of our other leaders today in America, including on the right wing? — Paul Begala

Castle Rock Middle School was a frowning pile of red brick standing between the Post Office and the Library, a holdover from the time when the town elders didn't feel entirely comfortable with a school unless it looked like a reformatory. — Stephen King

Reasercher 101,
I do not long for the old, unreachable days. When I'm plugged in I can go anywhere, do and learn anything. Today, for instance, I visited a tiny library in Portugal. I learned how the Shakers weave baskets and I discovered my best friend in middle school loves blood-orange sorbet. Okay, I also learned that a certain pop star actually believes she's a fairy, an honest-to-goodness fairy from the fey people, but my point is access. Access to information. I don't even have to look out my window to see what the eather is like. I can have the weather delivered every morning to my phone. What could be better?
Sincerely,
Wife 22
Wife 22,
Getting caught in the rain?
All the best,
Researcher 101 — Melanie Gideon

I got kicked out in grade school because I staged a riot because I wanted more library time. — Bitsie Tulloch

Our lips met hungrily, and his clever artistic hands wrapped around my hips. A sudden buzz from my regular cell phone startled me from the kissing.
"Don't," said Adrian, his eyes ablaze and breathing ragged.
"What if there's a crisis at school?" I asked. "What if Angeline 'accidentally' stole one of the campus buses and drove it into the library?"
"Why would she do that?"
"Are you saying she wouldn't?"
He sighed. "Go check it. — Richelle Mead

A school library is like the Bat Cave: it's a safe fortress in a chaotic world, a source of knowledge and the lair of a superhero.

True, the superhero is more likely to be wearing a cardigan than a batsuit, but still... — Tom Angleberger

For no one, in our long decline,So dusty, spiteful and divided,Had quite such pleasant friends as mine,Or loved them half as much as I did. [stanza 3]The library was most inviting:The books upon the crowded shelvesWere mainly of our private writing:We kept a school and taught ourselves. [stanza 15]From quiet homes and first beginning,Out to the undiscovered ends,Theres nothing worth the wear of winning,But laughter and the love of friends. [stanza 22]You do retain the song we set,And how it rises, trips and scans?You keep the sacred memory yet,Republicans? Republicans?[stanza 36] — Hilaire Belloc

Public libraries are our great teachers and storytellers, and are a vital adjunct to our schools. In this day of standardized and homogenized education, a library offers individual and personalized learning opportunities second to none. — Julie Andrews

If I can give one bit of advice to any drama major, high school theater kid, or inmate who is reading this in a prison library with dreams of being cast in he prison play, its this: write your own part. It is the only way I've gotten anywhere. It is much harder work, but sometimes you ave to take destiny into your own hands. — Mindy Kaling

Some of the best memories of my childhood that I have are the times that I played hooky from school so I could spend my days in the public library reading all the wonderful books at my disposal. — Woody Allen

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

During this time (at high school) I discovered the Public Library ... It was here that I found a source of knowledge and the means to acquire it by reading, a habit of learning which I still follow to this day. I also became interested in chemistry and gradually accumulated enough test tubes and other glassware to do chemical experiments, using small quantities of chemicals purchased from a pharmacy supply house. I soon graduated to biochemistry and tried to discover what gave flowers their distinctive colours. I made the (to me) astounding discovery that the pigments I extracted changed their colours when I changed the pH of the solution. — Sydney Brenner

Read a short story every day. By the end of the week you would have read volumes of stories. — Lailah Gifty Akita

The humble little school library ... was a ramp to everything
in the world and beyond, everything that could be dreamed and
imagined, everything that could be known, everything that could be hoped. — Lee Sherman

Access to a school library results in more reading. — Stephen D. Krashen

tried to understand what I'd seen. I felt as if I'd just stepped out of a limn on twentieth-century book burnings: gaunt, vampiric Goebbels screaming beside a seditious inferno; Stalin; Mao and his Red Guards; Iranian forces in the Republic of Mahabad burning anything in Kurdish; midcentury New York school kids incinerating comics in Binghamton; Ray Bradbury's firemen; apartheid-era librarians; Pinochet; Pol Pot; Serbian nationalists setting fire to the National and University Library. — Alena Graedon

This is incredible. This is quite amazing because who you're honoring tonight is not only myself but the ghost of a lot of your favorite writers. And I wouldn't be here except that they spoke to me in the library. The library's been the center of my life. I never made it to college. I started going to the library when I graduated from high school. I went to the library every day for three or four days a week for 10 years and I graduated from the library when I was 28. — Ray Bradbury

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

I have written 240 books on a wide variety of topics ... Some of it I based on education I received in my school, but most of it was backed by other ways of learning - chiefly in the books I obtained in the public library. — Isaac Asimov

I was getting tired about what the preacher called Christian. Anything he did was Christian, and the people in his church believed it, too. If he stole some book he didn't like from the library, or made the radio station play only part of the day on Sunday, or took somebody off to the state poor home, he called it Christian. I never had much religious training, and I never went to Sunday school because we didn't belong to the church when I was old enough to go, but I thought I knew what believing in Christ meant, and it wasn't half the things the preacher did. — John Kennedy Toole

When I graduated from high school I couldn't go to college, so I went to the library 3 days a week for 10 years. — Ray Bradbury

When I was a young boy, I loved spending hours in St. Franics Xavier's school library at Saint Louis University. The feel of the books in my hands and the magical new worlds I discovered always drew me back to that fantastic place. Each time I visited, I could expect to find a new adventure and from time to time use my imagination to revisit my favorite place and enjoy Green Eggs and Ham in a house, with a mouse, on a train, on a plane, in a box, with a fox ... — William Lacy Clay Jr.

We find paradise in every library and bookshop. — Lailah Gifty Akita

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