The Hidden Library Quotes & Sayings

The moment I walk into a bookstore, I remember what I love about them. They are an oasis of intellectual calm. Perhaps it's the potential of all the ideas hidden behind those delicious covers. Or perhaps it's the social reverence for the library-like quiet. You don't yell in a bookstore; you'll piss off the books. — Michael Lopp

Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own? — Jared Diamond

Pagan

At home
in the countryside
I make the decision
to leave your book
--overdue at the library--
face up, 'promiscuous'
out in the sun.

Pagan.

I laugh to see
this was our religion
all along.

Hidden
even from ourselves
taught
early
not to touch
the earth.

Years of white gloves
straight seamed hose.
'Being good girls.'
Scripture like chains.
Dogma like flies.
Smiles like locks
and lies. — Alice Walker

That didn't make sense to me. That he would die and raise from the dead in three days." "It is the Messianic secret, kept hidden from the principalities and the powers. And yet it was in plain sight all along." "What do you mean?" "Jesus told us that no sign shall be given this generation of ours except the sign of Jonah. He said that just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. I remember reading a revelation from the angel Gabriel that was recorded on stone and stored in the library at Qumran. — Brian Godawa

The whole world was this symphony, and there was not enough of her to listen. — Carson McCullers

What a great treasure can be hidden in a small, selected library! A company of the wisest and the most deserving people from all the civilized countries of the world, for thousands of years, can make the results of their studies and their wisdom available to us. The thought which they might not even reveal to their best friends is written here in clear words for us, people from another century. Yes, we should be grateful for the best books, for the best spiritual achievements in our lives. - RALPH WALDO EMERSON — Leo Tolstoy

Of all the screams cataloged in the encyclopedic audio library of the Hidden Schools, Tara's bore the closest resemblance to the scream of a man whose abdomen was being devoured by a jagged-clawed insect that wore a child's face. After — Max Gladstone

She screamed. Not a normal scream of pain, but a deep and blind cry as reason deserted her. Of all the screams cataloged in the encyclopedic audio library of the Hidden Schools, Tara's bore the closest resemblance to the scream of a man whose abdomen was being devoured by a jagged-clawed insect that wore a child's face. — Max Gladstone

People are often dismissive of librarians and libraries - as if the words are synonymous with boredom or timidity. But isn't that where the best stories are kept? Hidden away on the library bookshelves, lost and forgotten, waiting, waiting, until someone like me comes along, and wants to borrow them? — Justine Picardie

Every time I've built character, I've regretted it. — Bill Watterson

Hundreds of thousands of people live in my library. Some are real, others are fictional. The real ones are the so-called imaginary characters in works of literature, the fictional ones are their authors. We know everything about the former, or at least as much as we are meant to know, everything that is written about a given character in a novel, a story or a poem in which she or he figures ... The rest doesn't matter. Nothing is hidden from us. For us, a novel's characters are real. (p. 80 — Jacques Bonnet

Destinies, are like roads.
Relationships are much like destinies. Therefore, relationships are like roads.
Some roads are circular. They start at one spot and end in the same. Some roads fork and force. Their travelers to choose which way to go. Some roads go great distances. And then there are those that
end abruptly.
Who is to say that a short road is less meaningful than a long? — Heather Lyons

Montrose decided then and there that a full library, one made of old-fashioned paper books with bindings, the kind that cannot be electronically re-edited by anonymous lines of hidden code, was just as much a necessity for a free man as a shooting iron or a printing press. — John C. Wright

I went into the library and read about fast food and became amazed by all the stuff I didn't know. I learned that there is a whole world behind the counter that, it seemed to me, has been deliberately hidden from the public. — Eric Schlosser

Consider what you have in the smallest well-chosen library-a company of the wisest and wittiest men which can be plucked out of all civilized countries in a thousand years. The men themselves were then hidden and inaccessible. They were solitary, impatient of interruption, and fenced by etiquette. But now they are immortal, and the thought they did not reveal, even to their bosom friends, is here written out in transparent words of light to us, who are strangers of another age. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Love like the sun can't be held down or captured. Love has no weight nor depth, no height, no length, no matter. Love is like a spark of inspiration, the flittering touch of a butterfly's wing, a sudden, unexpected, ephemeral flash of lightning. Grab it when you can. — Chloe Thurlow

Many programmers would prefer to mock in their client library specs, but doing so could result in the service and client passing all specs with hidden failures. — Paul Dix

The Cemetery of Forgotten Books is like the greatest, most fantastic library you could ever imagine. It's a labyrinth of books with tunnels, bridges, arches, secret sections - and it's hidden inside an old palace in the old city of Barcelona. — Carlos Ruiz Zafon

David Foster Wallace: What writers have is a license and also the freedom to sit - to sit, clench their fists, and make themselves be excruciatingly aware of the stuff that we're mostly aware of only on a certain level. And that if the writer does his job right, what he basically does is remind the reader of how smart the reader is. Is to wake the reader up to stuff that the reader's been aware of all the time. And it's not a question of the writer having more capacity than the average person. It's that the writer is willing I think to cut off, cut himself off from certain stuff, and develop ... and just, and think really hard. Which not everybody has the luxury to do. — David Lipsky

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

He knew that her body was his to engage in all the acrobatics he had learned in the books he kept hidden in a corner of his library, but with Clara even the most abominable contortions were like the thrashings of a newborn; it was impossible to spice them up with the salt of evil or the pepper of submission. — Isabel Allende

This larger goal wouldn't be the imitation of education in Universities today, glossed over and concealed by grades and degrees that give the appearance of something happening when, in fact, almost nothing is going on. It would be the real thing. — Robert M. Pirsig