Libraries Quotes

Believe it or not working in libraries is very similar to working on an ambulance or a fire truck. You take care of a lot of homeless people, you sometimes have to clean up things that require latex gloves, you always wear comfortable shoes, and you put out a lot of “fires”!

Lori Reed

Massive changes may have occurred in libraries in recent years, with new digital resources and services supplementing the old traditional resources and services, the dog-eared card catalogues ripped up and destroyed, workstations suddenly everywhere, but one essential aspect of “libraryness” has not changed: libraries remain places dedicated to storage. Books continue to be published in greater and greater numbers – so great in fact that there are no accurate figures as to exactly how many are published: some say one every thirty seconds, others four thousand per day, others a million per year – and somehow, whether through the off-site storage of the physical books themselves, or microfilm copying, or digital scanning, we remain obliged to keep up with or afloat in this vast deluge of paper. Even the new, high-tech rebranded libraries opened to great fanfare in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets in the 1990s could not get away from this essential fact of paper hoarding: they were called “Idea Stores.” - p.56

Ian Sansom

In his library he had been always sure of leisure and tranquility; and though prepared, as he told Elizabeth, to meet with folly and conceit in every other room in the house, he was used to be free from them there

Jane Austen

All across America public libraries were, and are, being shut down, while prisons-with libraries-were, and are, being built. This has been a choice the American public has been making for over thirty years.

Avi Steinberg

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

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

I found that I could not contemplate an adult life in which books were not dominant. I wanted to live and work with them...I had to be able to take books from their places, run my finger over their backs, see how they opened, flick their corners straight. I wanted a perspective of bookshelves always in my eye. And books, books, books. This was not a rational way of determining on a career and was much tainted by mushiness. But it was the way in which my decision hardened, before I was fifteen years old, to become a librarian.

Clifford Currie Librarian of the Ashmolean Library Oxford

The library was quiet. It was busy but it was quiet and I thought it must be like this in a monastery where you had company and sympathy but your thoughts were your own.

Jeanette Winterson

For six months, then, Emma, at fifteen years of age, made her hands dirty with books from old lending libraries.

Gustave Flaubert

Impersonating a quiet, gentle librarian like Barbara Gordon--You deserve to be taken out of circulation!

Karl Kesel

When life seems not worth living, ten minutes in a library proves otherwise.

Miv Schaaf

...bookstores, libraries... they're the closest thing I have to a church.

Jim C. Hines

A library in the middle of a community is a cross between an emergency exit, a life raft and a festival. They are cathedrals of the mind; hospitals of the soul; theme parks of the imagination.

Caitlin Moran

Libraries are the thin red line between civilization and barba

Neil Gaiman

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

I was pretty sure I'd just had a nerdgasm.

Nicole Peeler

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

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

I told him. We got a library here. Got plenty of good books, too. -Larry Brown, Dirty Work

Larry Brown

It was a common complaint amongst the Arts students that their library was in dire need of refurbishment. To call the old building shabby chic was being kind. It didn’t have automated stacks or self-service machines like the Management and Sciences library the other side of campus and the carpets and bookcases looked like they were probably the Victorian originals. But on days like this one, where the springtime sunshine streamed in through the high windows and set the dust motes dancing, Harriet sincerely felt that those BSc lot could stuff their vending machines and state of the art study pods. The Old Library was clearly suited for those who had poetry in their souls, rather than numbers in their heads.

Erin Lawless

I walked straight to the library. Mrs. Bloom, the librarian, always knows everything.

Augusta Scattergood

For the rest of the afternoon, Miss Bloom smiled almost as bright as the big yellow sun shining through the front picture window. Her library was filled up with people who loved books.

Augusta Scattergood

An ancient mustiness padded the air, tinged with with an acrid scent-a trace of the war between paper and oxygen, played out in slow inexorable burn that would one day crumble this empire to dust." -page 62

Jennifer Lee Carrell

Inside the front flap of the book were handwritten names of the dozen or so people who had checked the book out before Naomi. Instead of writing her name, Naomi had a thin paper receipt with the due date printed on it. She could never possess this book the way those other people had. It was one of those uselessly nostalgic and sentimental thoughts that serve only our own romantic ideals, but I couldn't help believing it was true nonetheless. I took a pencil out from behind the register and handed it to her.

Dinaw Mengestu

Libraries are always bigger on the inside because every book has an entire word inside of it.

Robert Arger

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

The door of Reverend Verringer’s impressive manse is opened by an elderly female with a face like a pine plank; the Reverend is unmarried, and has need of an irreproachable housekeeper. Simon is ushered into the library. It is so self-consciously the right sort of library that he has an urge to set fire to it.

Margaret Atwood

I like libraries. It’s a comfort that knowledge can be saved for so long.

Scarlet Jackson Pearce

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

People are often dismissive of librarians and libraries....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

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

The high domed ceiling put me in mind of a skull, a brain, a mind. What did that make us, the readers?

Lia Mills

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

We have an obligation to support libraries. To use libraries, to encourage others to use libraries, to protest the closure of libraries. If you do not value libraries then you do not value information or culture or wisdom. You are silencing the voices of the past and you are damaging the future.We have an obligation to read aloud to our children. To read them things they enjoy. To read to them stories we are already tired of. To do the voices, to make it interesting, and not to stop reading to them just because they learn to read to themselves. Use reading-aloud time as bonding time, as time when no phones are being checked, when the distractions of the world are put aside.

Neil Gaiman

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

Papa thought that any book worth reading twice was worth owning. So instead of buying desserts, we bought books.

Natalie S. Bober

I walked inside and paused for a moment to breathe in the scent of paper and dust—the perfumes of knowledge.

Chloe Neill

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

All libraries must submit to a certain order, I answered. Indeed, agreed the professor, or all will be lost. The fall of nations and empires begins with the fall of libraries.

Rawi Hage

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

She read her way around the library, hungry for journeys, adventures, laughter and passion. She took each new book to bed like a lover, savouring every chapter, going too far some nights until the letters danced like insects and she was groggy next day at work. But still she'd sneak away for lunchtime trysts, her eager fingers fumbling for the bookmark.

Cath Staincliffe

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

There is a sad disconnectedness that overcomes a library when its owner is gone.

Lois McMaster Bujold

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

when the press and problems of humanity become too much, I love to escape into books, where people are served up in digestible portions and can be pushed to one side when one is satiated.

Jane Wilson-Howarth

The librarian of today, and it will be true still more of the librarians of tomorrow, are not fiery dragons interposed between the people and the books. They are useful public servants, who manage libraries in the interest of the public... Many still think that a great reader, or a writer of books, will make an excellent librarian. This is pure fallacy.

William Osler

Information is valuable. Librarians and libraries are, at best incidental; at worst, in the way.

Donald A. Barclay

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

Libraries are brothels for the mind. Which means that librarians are the madams, greeting punters, understanding their strange tastes and needs, and pimping their books.

Guy Browning

My Alma mater is the Chicago Public Library.

David Mamet

One of the many reasons I love libraries. Everyone is lost and not wanting to be found in a library.

Sarah Noffke

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

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

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

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

Millions of pages cloaked in dust and inspiration and wisdom.

Sarah Noffke

Do not trust an architect: he will always try to talk you into an atrium.

Elizabeth McCracken

In the nonstop tsunami of global information, librarians provide us with floaties and teach us how to swim. – Linton Weeks, Washington Post, 13 January 2001

Tatyana Eckstrand

In my world there would be as many public libraries as there are Starbucks.

Henry Rollins

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

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