Quotes by American Authors - Page 223

...it's appalling to remember that the entire Oxford University Library was sold for scrap in the mid-1500s. Nor was that situation unique to Oxford, as libraries were deconstructed throughout the land.
Owen Gingerich
There's so much proscription in the lives of young people, and it's so vital to have a place that says, look, here are the doors onto the world and amazingly, you're free to choose any one you like. - Patrick Ness on Libraries
Patrick Ness
If we didn't already have libraries, they would now have to be invented. They are the keys to American success in fully exploiting the information superhighways of the future.
James H. Billington
The most important thing of all was not the poverty of its ess
David Drake
My guess is (it will be) about 300 years until computers are as good as, say, your local reference library in search.
Craig Silverstein
A teenager deserves a library that recognizes reality. He needs an information source and study area that does not impose arbitrary, crippling rules on him. His library should recognize that dignity and silence are not prior requisites to learning […] He would like, needs, and deserves for other people to stop trying to protect him and allow him the right to choose information for himself […] Most of all the teenager needs people in libraries to recognize and accept him as a respectable human being.
Anne Osborn
Libraries are not facing crisis, they are in crisis.
Patrick Ness
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
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
Librarians who are arguing and lobbying for clever e-book lending solutions are completely missing the point. They are defending the library-as-warehouse concept, as opposed to fighting for the future, which is librarian as producer, concierge, connector, teacher, and impresario.
Seth Godin
It’s always the end of the world,” said Russell Grandinetti, one of Amazon’s top executives. “You could set your watch on it arriving.” He pointed out, though, that the landscape was in some ways changing for the first time since Gutenberg invented the modern book nearly 600 years ago. “The only really necessary people in the publishing process now are the writer and reader,” he said. “Everyone who stands between those two has both risk and opportunity.” Amazon Signs Up Authors, Writing Publishers Out of Deal. New York Times, 10/16/2011
Russell Grandinetti
Speaking of libraries: A big open-stack academic or public library is no small pleasure to work in. You're, say, trying to do a piece on something in Nevada, and you go down to C Floor, deep in the earth, and out to what a miner would call a remote working face. You find 10995.497S just where the card catalog and the online computer thought it would be, but that is only the initial nick. The book you knew about has led you to others you did not know about. To the ceiling the shelves are loaded with books about Nevada. You pull them down, one at a time, and sit on the floor and look them over until you are sitting on a pile five feet high, at which point you are late home for dinner and you get up and walk away. It's an incomparable boon to research, all that; but it is also a reason why there are almost no large open-stack libraries left in the world.
John McPhee
Libraries have always been there for me. Of course I'll stand up for them.
Marilyn Johnson
Her library is a meeting place for all who love books. They discuss matters of the world and matters of the spirit.
Jeanette Winter
‎The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
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
Librarians have always been among the most thoughtful and helpful people. They are teachers without a classroom. No libraries, no progress.
Willard Scott
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.
Libba Bray
A library, to modify the famous metaphor of Socrates, should be the delivery room for the birth of ideas - a place where history comes to life.
Norman Cousins
Most people either love or hate old libraries. To some, a room like this--dim, high-ceilinged, dusty, smelling of old paper and crumbling leather--would be oppressive, a place to flee from in search of sun and air. To others, like me, it was a wonderful cave filled with unimaginable treasures and unexpected treats. I always found myself inhaling deeply when I entered the stacks, as if trying to absorb part of them into my bloodstream.
Sheila Connolly
One of the nastier trends in library management in recent years is the notion that libraries should be 'responsive to their patrons'.
Connie Willis
Shout for libraries. Shout for the young readers who use them.
Patrick Ness
She was brilliant and joyous and she believed- probably correctly- that libraries contain the answers to all things, to everything, and that if you can't find the information you seek in the library, then such information probably doesn't exist in this or any parallel universe now or ever to be known. She was thoughtful and kind and she always believed the best of everybody. She was, above all else, a master librarian and she knew where to find any book on any subject in the shortest possible time. And she was wonderfully unhinged.
Gary Paulsen
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
You must live feverishly in a library. Colleges are not going to do any good unless you are raised and live in a library everyday of your life.
Ray Bradbury
I fall in love with any girl who smells of library paste.
Charles M. Schulz
I like libraries. It's a comfort that knowledge can be save for so long. That what we learn can be passed on.
Jackson Pearce
I am convinced that grandkids are inherently evil people who tell their grandparents to "just go to the library and open up an e-mail account - it's free and so simple.
Scott Douglas
I do not understand people who will lustily throw $40,000 at the shiny red automobile of their choice, but well up with tears and become outraged when they are asked to pay $5 for a damaged videotape. Either they are fucked up and their priorities are fucked up or I am fucked up and my priorities are fucked up. Because I am me, I think it is them.
Don Borchert
Did the men steal the papers?" Reynie asked, fearing her response.No, because they are fools," Sophie said bitterly. "They demanded to see the papers, and when I did not answer fast enough -- they were very frightening, you see -- they hurt me so that I was not awake. . . . When I opened my eyes they were still trying to find the papers. They did not understand how we organize the library, you see. They were angry and creating a bad mess. . . . The police were coming and the men decided they must leave. I shouted at them as they left: 'It is a free and public library! All you had to do was ask!
Trenton Lee Stewart
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
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
You don't spend your life hanging around books without learning a thing or two.
Lemony Snicket
One of the most subversive institutions in the United States is the public library..
Bell Hooks
A great library doesn't have to be big or beautiful. It doesn't have to have the best facilities or the most efficient staff or the most users. A great library provides. It is enmeshed in the life of a community in a way that makes it indispensable. A great library is one nobody notices because it is always there, and always has what people need.
Vicki Myron
In the nonstop tsunami of global information, librarians provide us with floaties and teach us to swim.
Linton Weeks
When the going gets tough, the tough get a librarian.
Joan Bauer
Wizards and computers get along about as well as flamethrowers and libraries.
Jim Butcher
She sounds like someone who spends a lot of time in libraries, which are the best sorts of people.
Catherynne M. Valente
Ben wished the world was organized by the Dewey decimal system. That way you'd be able to find whatever you were looking for.
Brian Selznick
Sometimes the soul takes pictures of things it has wished for, but never seen.
Anne Sexton
Not to wish too hard for a shift in circumstances since it never happens as you imagine.
Ann Aguirre
If wishes were horses," she murmured, "beggars would ride.
Jennifer Haymore
The only thing I can tell you is when it's there, you know it. And when it ain't, no amount of wishful thinking will make it so.
Ginny Baird
He imagined them sitting somewhere, just enjoying each other's company, her head on his chest, his arm around her. And he realized how desperately lonely he had become.
Tim LaHaye
All I ever wanted was to make my parents proud. What happens when I can't be proud of them?" --Shea Evenstar
Maximilian Timm
She kept the wish to herself, as she should have, and simply blew out the candle.I clapped and whistled and then dove into my own cupcake, dying to know how my creations tasted. And seeing as I’d done the hard work—frosting and decorating—I felt like I could take credit and call them my creations. All Cassie had done was get the ingredients, come up with the recipe, and do all the measuring and mixing.
Richelle Mead
Sylvi wished she could gouge out the look in Dorogin's stony eyes, and change the course of history. She wished Fthoom had been eaten by a sea monster.
Robin McKinley
Wishes, I am finding, are fickle things when they turn on you.
Jennifer Ellision
But he just stared at my eyes, as if searching for a stray eyelash. A free wish.
Leah Raeder
Everyone know—or at least, was probably told as a child—that you can make a wish on a shooting star. Not everyone knows that the only way to be sure it will come ture is to speak it aloud before the star disappears, and this is a nearly imposssible fet to manage.
Kate Milford
First, I spit out a mouthful of dirt. Then, I screamed at the sky. “That’s it! I’ve had it! Everything is trying to kill me! All I did was make one stupid wish. Aladdin made three. I’m the hero of this story, so where’s my happy ending, already? It’s not fair.”Rexi bent over, trying to catch her breath. “You know what’s not fair? Spending Muse Day as a toad just because the kitchen ran out of frog legs. Or being volunteered for this little journey. So build a bridge, then make like a billy goat and get over it already because no one is listening.
Betsy Schow
Dear Grimm, we’re not in Emerald anymore.” I started to hyperventilate.Rexi remained sprawled on her back. She barely opened an eye at my hysterics. “Duh.
Betsy Schow
God, I wish, for the millionth time, that I could be like her and Nic, so sure of what they have, what they want. That I didn't always feel jangly, restless, primed to jump off a bridge and let the current carry me away.
Huntley Fitzpatrick
A world in which people with learning difficulties have access to the resources they need to live happier, healthier, more secure and more meaningful lives.
Steve Silberman
It’s not too late,” he says. “Zahra, I—”“Sh.” I lay a finger across his lips. “Don’t say it. You will marry Caspida, and you will learn to love each other. You will live a happy life, long after my lamp has passed to new hands.”“I won’t make my third wish,” he says. “That’s the answer! If I don’t make the wish, you can stay here in the palace for as long as you want. You’ll never have to go back to your lamp. We can fight off anyone who tries to take you from me.
Jessica Khoury
Use your wish,” I whisper to Aladdin, opening my eyes. “Please.”“If I do,” he replies softly, “I’ll lose you.
Jessica Khoury
Sometimes you have to choose whether what you’re wishin’ for is really what you want
Corinne Michaels
She wondered again about her inclination to wish for things that made her so deeply unhappy.
Ann Brashares
I wish you'd fall in love with me," she said."Why?""Because you're really someone worth falling in love with. And if we were in love, I wouldn't be drifting. I wouldn't be nobody. At least not while I was with you.
Anne Rampling