Quotes by Authors - Page 229

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
You get a lot of borderline cases in libraries.
Anita Brookner
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
She liked books, but the hours spent in small-town libraries were tedious, and she began the first list when she was eight or nine as a means of distraction. A list of names, eventually expanding to ten or twelve pages: Lilia, Gabriel, Anna, Michelle. In every town her name was different.
Emily St. John Mandel
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.
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
in principle and reality, libraries are life-enhancing palaces of wonder
Gail Honeyman
The most important thing of all was not the poverty of its ess
David Drake
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
The woman at the desk was a university graduate, young, colourless, spectacled, and intensely disagreeable. She had a fixed suspicion that no one — at least, no male person — ever consulted works of reference except in search of pornography. As soon as you approached she pierced you through and through with a flash of her pince-nez and let you know that your dirty secret was no secret from HER. After all, all works of reference are pornographical, except perhaps Whitaker’s Almanack. You can put even the Oxford Dictionary to evil purposes by looking up words like —— and ——.
George Orwell
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
When reading you have the opportunity to pause for thought & spark your imagination. It develops intellect. Nothing more threatening to a politician than a well read working class.
Alan Moore
Libraries really are the gates to the future. So it is unfortunate that, round the world, we observe local authorities seizing the opportunity to close libraries as an easy way to save money, without realising that they are stealing from the future to pay for today. They are closing the gates that should be open.
Neil Gaiman
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
They should be taking bonuses from bankers, not library books from schoolchildren. What kind of society are we building?
Sara Sheridan
Librarians have always been among the most thoughtful and helpful people. They are teachers without a classroom. No libraries, no progress.
Willard Scott
The bookshop felt damp and chilly, but it was still and unsupervised bookshop, and Anna felt a frisson of excitement as she scanned the shelves with greedy eyes. Libraries weren't quite the same, she'd found; something about the prosaic smell of other people's houses and fingers seeping off the pages diluted that sense of magical worlds, but untouched, unread, unexplored books were something else.
Lucy Dillon
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
Controller Borasus sighed with relief. Libraries were not places of danger. It had to be a hoax.
Diana Wynne Jones
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
It's wrong for libraries to have limited budgets.
Jo Walton
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
To ask why we need libraries at all, when there is so much information available elsewhere, is about as sensible as asking if roadmaps are necessary now that there are so very many r
Jon Bing
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
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
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
People flock in, nevertheless, in search of answers to those questions only librarians are considered to be able to answer, such as "Is this the laundry?" "How do you spell surreptitious?" and, on a regular basis, "Do you have a book I remember reading once? It had a red cover and it turned out they were twins.
Terry Pratchett
It's still National Library Week. You should be especially nice to a librarian today, or tomorrow. Sometime this week, anyway. Probably the librarians would like tea. Or chocolates. Or a reliable source of funding.
Neil Gaiman
Libraries really are wonderful. They're better than bookshops, even. I mean bookshops make a profit on selling you books, but libraries just sit there lending you books quietly out of the goodness of their hearts.
Jo Walton
Librarians are the coolest people out there doing the hardest job out there on the frontlines. And every time I get to encounter or work with librarians, I'm always impressed by their sheer awesomeness.
Neil Gaiman
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
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
Life is not about finding your true self, but creating who you wish to be.
Steven Redhead
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