Quotes by American Authors - Page 222

I walked straight to the library. Mrs. Bloom, the librarian, always knows everything.
Augusta Scattergood
I told him. We got a library here. Got plenty of good books, too. -Larry Brown, Dirty Work
Larry Brown
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
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
I was pretty sure I'd just had a nerdgasm.
Nicole Peeler
The public library contains multitudes. And each person who visits contains multitudes as well. Each of us is a library of thoughts, memories, experiences, and odors. We adapt to one another to produce the human condition.
Josh Hanagarne
...bookstores, libraries... they're the closest thing I have to a church.
Jim C. Hines
When life seems not worth living, ten minutes in a library proves otherwise.
Miv Schaaf
Impersonating a quiet, gentle librarian like Barbara Gordon--You deserve to be taken out of circulation!
Karl Kesel
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
Mark Twain
Here was one place where I could find out who I was and what I was going to become. And that was the public library.
Jerzy Kosiński
It was funny how none of her classes in library science has prepared her for this sort of thing, dead bodies, staff under suspicion, crazed reporters. Really, they needed to consider expanding the curriculum.
Jenn McKinlay
There is a sad disconnectedness that overcomes a library when its owner is gone.
Lois McMaster Bujold
My parents, and librarians along the way, taught me about the space between words; about the margins, where so many juicy moments of life and spirit and friendship could be found. In a library, you could find miracles and truth and you might find something that would make you laugh so hard that you get shushed, in the friendliest way. There was sanctuary in a library, there is sanctuary now, from the war, from the storms of our family and our own anxious minds. Libraries are like the mountain, or the meadows behind the goat lady’s house: sacred s
Anne Lamott
She hadn't met Earth or Fire, the other two cousins, but she'd filled a couple of library requests for each of them in the past week. If they were around, they would help her. Wouldn't they?
Anne Bishop
Be careful. As if something’s going to jump us in a library.”“You might be surprised.”“What do you mean?”“You know how people say a book is really gripping?”“Don’t tell me…” Cat trailed off.“Libraries can be dangerous.
Max Gladstone
I walked inside and paused for a moment to breathe in the scent of paper and dust—the perfumes of knowledge.
Chloe Neill
Papa thought that any book worth reading twice was worth owning. So instead of buying desserts, we bought books.
Natalie S. Bober
The world is full of magical places, and the library has always been one of them for me. A library can be that special place for our children.
Julie Andrews Edwards
Books on the bookshelvesAnd stacked on the floorBooks kept in basketsAnd propped by the doorBooks in neat pilesAnd in disarrayBooks tucked in closetsAnd books on displayBooks filling cranniesAnd books packed in nooksBooks massed in windowsAnd mounded in crooksLibraries beckonAnd bookstores inviteBut book-filled rooms welcomeUs back home at night!
L.R. Knost
But I didn't mind. I loved that everything was cataloged and ready to go and that I was technically now living and sleeping in a library.
B.J. Novak
Suppose each of us make up a list of, say, fifty or more books that we believe should be in the library. Then , when Robinson goes to the bookseller in Philadelphia let him start with the first of each of our chooses, then the second of each, and so on down, omitting duplicates, of course. Let him go as far as his money lasts. How does that sound.""Vandaliz has a library," Fell said, "and so has Springfield and Edwardsville. why not Everton.
Harold Sinclair
That the public library is a part of the educational system should never be lost sight of in the work of establishing it, or in its management. To the great mass of the people it comes as their first and only educational opportunity.
John Cotton Dana
I liked the thought that the book I was now holding had been held by dozens of others.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
Shara was already an avid reader by then, but she had never realized until that moment what books meant, the possibility they presented: you could protect them forever, store them up like engineers store water, endless resources of time and knowledge snared in ink, tied down to paper, layered on shelves.... Moments made physical, untouchable, perfect, like preserving a dead hornet in crystal, one drop of venom forever hanging from its stinger.She felt overwhelmed. It was--she briefly thinks of herself and Vo, reading together in the library--a lot like being in love for the first time.
Robert Jackson Bennett
I loved going to the library. It was the first time I ever saw Black newspapers and magazines like JET, Ebony, the Baltimore Afro-American, or the Chicago Defender. And I’ll never forget my librarian.
John Lewis
You poor girl, what sort of aged, unfriendly Libraries have you met in short life? A silent Library is a sad Library ... A Library should be full of exclamations! ... A Library should be full of now-just-a-minutes and that-can't-be-rights and scientifick folk running skelter to prove somebody wrong... A Library should not shush ; it should roar !
Catherynne M. Valente
In my world there would be as many public libraries as there are Starbucks.
Henry Rollins
Do not trust an architect: he will always try to talk you into an atrium.
Elizabeth McCracken
Millions of pages cloaked in dust and inspiration and wisdom.
Sarah Noffke
I became interested in librarians while researching my first book, about obituaries. With the exception of a few showy eccentrics, like the former soldier in Hitler's army who had a sex change and took up professional whistling, the most engaging obit subjects were librarians. An obituary of a librarian could be about anything under the sun, a woman with a phenomenal memory, who recalled the books her aging patrons read as children—and was also, incidentally, the best sailor on her stretch of the Maine coast—or a man obsessed with maps, who helped automate the Library of Congress's map catalog and paved the way for wonders like Google Maps.
Marilyn Johnson
Librarians are on the front lines of an invisible struggle over our information diet and, for better or worse, the scales are not tipping in their direction.
Peter Morville
When I was a student I spent a lot of time in the library. That's where the books and smart girls were.
Mike Bove
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
One of the many reasons I love libraries. Everyone is lost and not wanting to be found in a library.
Sarah Noffke
My Alma mater is the Chicago Public Library.
David Mamet
Morris tried to keep the books in some sort of order, but they always mixed themselves up. The tragedies needed cheering up and would visit with the comedies. The encyclopedias, weary of facts, would relax with the comic books and fictions. All in all it was an agreeable jumble.
William Joyce
Information is valuable. Librarians and libraries are, at best incidental; at worst, in the way.
Donald A. Barclay
I tell you, if you feel strange, strange things will happen to you: Fallen peacocks on library shelves
Rita Dove
The Leningrad Public Library remained open throughout the siege and became a place for people to congregate. People came to the library to read, even when weak from cold and exhaustion . . . Some died in their places, with a book propped in front of them . . . In the course of the war, the librarians greatly expanded the collection, purchasing books from the starving, who were desperate to sell anything for food. Some of the city's librarians scoured bombed ruins for volumes, scrabbling over the piles of brick with their backpacks full of salvaged books.
M.T Anderson
At the moment that we persuade a child, any child, to cross that threshold, that magic threshold into a library, we change their lives forever, for the better.
Barack Obama
There is no fighting in the Library. Anyone who starts a fight or responds to a challenge will be thrown out. You may think you can take me. You're probably right. But none of you can take the Library.
Seanan McGuire
In every town we lived in, there was one great big door ready to open for anyone — the library. And I never met a library I didn’t like.
William Stafford
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
I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people's interests. The library is open, unending, free.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Libraries are safe but also exciting. Libraries are where nerds like me go to refuel. They are safe-havens where the polluted noise of the outside world, with all the bullies and bro-dudes and anti-feminist rhetoric, is shut out. Libraries have zero tolerance for bullshit. Their walls protect us and keep us safe from all the bastards that have never read a book for fun.
Gabby Rivera
The pursuit of knowing was freedom to me, the right to declare your own curiosities and follow them through all manner of books. I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people’s interests. The library was open, unending, free. Slowly, I was discovering myself.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Marie's loud protestations about the lack of black history celebrations in town had resulted in a sheepish and hastily thrown together assembly each year at the public library, where all the while children and Adia sang praises to peanuts and open-heart surgery and air-conditioning underneath a store-printed banner that read THE WONDERS OF BLACK INNOVATION.
Kaitlyn Greenidge
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
Libraries are a tremendous and valuable resource, and I'm note sure it's possible to have too many of them.
Ann Leckie
It had always been my habit-- privately I felt it to be an ecstasy-- to enter, as into a mysterious vault, any public library. I was drawn to books that had been read before, novels that girls like myself had cradled and cherished. In my mind-- I suppose in my isolation-- I seized on all those previous readers, and everyone who would read after me, as phantom companions and secret friends.
Cynthia Ozick
The curtains were blood-red and drawn. This was not an office. It was a small library, two storeys high, with thin ladders and impractical balconies and an expansive ceiling featuring a gaggle of naked Greeks. It was the sort of library you'd marry a man for.
Catherine Lowell
It's night in the Free People's World Tree Library. All the librarians are asleep, ... between the pages of their enchanted novels.
Kelly Link
Somebody's going to have to make the money to buy you all those books.""They're free," Franny said. "I check them out of the library.""Well, thank God for libraries," Caroline said.
Ann Patchett
Depriving our communities of libraries will deprive our society of its ability to survive. - Neil Gaiman
Kyle Cassidy
There is a value to books—unhackable, paper books—that measures far beyond mere ink and paper.
Richard Due
the rent is a little higher herebut so far I've been able to pay itand that's a miracle toolike still maybe being sanewhile thinking of guns and sidewalksand old ladies in libraries.
Charles Bukowski
I thought I appreciated books, but this was an alter to the book gods. It was hard not to be impressed. I didn't know what had the most impact: the rosewood shelving, the rolling library ladders, the mezzanine floor with the ornate spiral wrought-iron staircases at each end, the carved moldings, the scent of well-loved books, or the silky Aubusson rugs in a soft faded palette of rose, sage and aqua.
Victoria Abbott
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
My experience with public libraries is that the first volume of the book I inquire for is out, unless I happen to want the second, when that is out.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.