My two favourite things in life are libraries and bicycles. They both move people forward without wasting anything. The perfect day: riding a bike to the library.

To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse.

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

Jacksonville has more public libraries than people who know how to read.

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.

What in the world would we do without our libraries?

[D]on’t ever apologize to an author for buying something in paperback, or taking it out from a library (that’s what they’re there for. Use your library). Don’t apologize to this author for buying books second...

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...

An original idea. That can’t be too hard. The library must be full of them.

From fire, water, the passage of time, neglectful readers, and the hand of the censor, each of my books has escaped to tell me its story.

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...

The library is not, as some would have it, a place for the retiring of disposition or faint of heart. It is not an ivory tower or a quiet room in a sanitarium facing away...

As a big user of public libraries, I deplore the cutbacks they have had to sustain.

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

When I was a student I spent a lot of time in the library. That’s where the books and smart girls were.

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...

Civilized nations build libraries; lands that have lost their soul close them down.

There was the smell of old books, a smell that has a way of making all libraries seem the same. Some say that smell is asbestos.

improving” literature. You’ll wind up with a generation convinced that reading is uncool and worse, unpleasant.We need our children to get onto the reading ladder: anything that they enjoy reading will move them up, rung...

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.

This place is a mystery. A sanctuary. Every book, every volume you see, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it & the soul of those who read it & lived it...

Public libraries have been a mainstay of my life. They represent an individual’s right to acquire knowledge; they are the sinews that bind civilized societies the world over. Without libraries, I would be a pauper,...

I like libraries. It’s a comfort that knowledge can be save for so long. That what we learn can be passed on.

I personally find that for domestic purposes, the Trivial Pursuit system works better than Dewey.

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

Tape automation is really going to be the main thing, in that you’re going to see big libraries, the robotics in them to handle tapes, so we get the human element out as much as...

I am a librarian. I discovered me in the library. I went to find me in the library. Before I fell in love with libraries, I was just a six-year-old boy. The library fueled all...

Libraries are sanctuaries from the world and command centers onto it: here in the quiet rooms are the lives of Crazy Horse and Aung San Suu Kyi, the Hundred Years’ War and the Opium Wars...

Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors. The library connects us with the insight and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, with...

You see, I don’t belive that libraries should be drab places where people sit in silence, that has been the main reason for our policy of employing wild animals as librarians.

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...

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.

We’ll always need printed books that don’t mutate the way digital books do; we’ll always need places to display books, auditoriums for book talks, circles for story time; we’ll always need brick-and-mortar libraries.

Reading is important.Books are important.Librarians are important. (Also, libraries are not child-care facilities, but sometimes feral children raise themselves among the stacks.)

The school district doesn’t have to be the provider. We will work with a consortium of people to use libraries and universities to house pre-K programs.

Nothing is pleasanter to me than exploring in a library.

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,...

If the library in the morning suggests an echo of the severe and reasonable wishful order of the world, the library at night seems to rejoice in the world’s essential, joyful muddle.

Libraries are about books. Books have no color. And they don’t care who reads them.

Mr. O’Donnell was at the library counter, performing the sort of grim rituals librarians perform with index cards and stumpy pencils and those rubber stamps with columns of rotating numbers. “Ms. Auerbach! What will it...

Mr. Collins was to attend them, at the request of Mr. Bennet, who was most anxious to get rid of him, and have his library to himself

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...

Libraries can be dangerous.

Libraries are the thin red line between civilization and barbarism.”[Libraries on the Front Lines, ALA interview 2011]

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.

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...

A library is a different kind of social reality (of the three dimensional kind), which by its very existence teaches a system of values beyond the fiscal.

I’ve got libraries in my blood.

Usually, I set one foot in a library and I feel my own internal volume lower. A library is a physical equivalent of a sigh. It’s the silence, sure, but it’s also the certainty of...

…I am still librarian in your house, for I never was dismissed, and never gave up the office. Now I am librarian here as well.”But you have just told me you were sexton here!”So I...