A fig for your precious society with its bridge parties, its inane chatter, its cheap mentality; its dances and vulgar banquets; its snobbery and cheap pretension. The humblest library can show you upon a single...

The library is like a candy store where everything is free.

Coffined thoughts around me, in mummycases, embalmed in spice of words. Thoth, god of libraries, a birdgod, moonycrowned. And I heard the voice of that Egyptian highpriest. In painted chambers loaded with tilebooks. They are...

I grew up in libraries, and I hope I’ve learned never to take them for granted. A thriving library is the heart of its community, providing access to information and educational opportunities, bringing people together,...

If this nation is to be wise as well as strong, if we are to achieve our destiny, then we need more new ideas for more wise men reading more good books in more public...

When my father first took me to Ennis Library I went down among the shelves and felt company, not only the company of writers, but the readers too, because they had lifted and opened and...

Libraries are sexual dream factories. The langour brings it on.

Many existing top 20 Scottish writers have flourished in part because of good turns done by institutions, arts community, libraries and bookshops.

RESTITUTIONS, n. The founding or endowing of universities and public libraries by gift or bequest.

I go into my library, and all history unrolls before me. I breathe the morning air of the world while the scent of Eden’s roses yet lingered in it, while it vibrated only to the...

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...

Whatever you call me, my parents encouraged me to go to college and become a book lover, and to trust that I could do nearly anything if I could find the right book at the...

Wizards and computers get along about as well as flamethrowers and libraries.

Though I loved the wired world, the new-wave librarians, the avatars and activists, I turned into a dinosaur in that library. I couldn’t help it; I was an old-fashioned writer who loved the ancient books...

I always say, ‘Books beat boredom,’ said Amanda wisely.

THOMASINA:But then the Egyptian noodle made carnal embrace with the enemy who burned the great library of Alexandria without so much as a fine for all that is overdue!

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.

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...

In my fool hardy youth, when my friends were dreaming of heroic deeds in the realms of engineering and law, finance and national politics, I dreamt of becoming a librarian.

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.

Idea Stores.” – p.56

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...

Interlibrary loans are a wonder of the world and a glory of civilization.

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.

I grew up in a utopia, I did. California when I was a child was a child’s paradise, I was healthy, well fed, well clothed, well housed. I went to school and there were libraries...

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...

A man’s library is a sort of harem.

What is more important to a library than anything else — than everything else — is the fact that it exists.”[The Premise Of Meaning, American Scholar; Washington, DC, June 5, 1972]

Is that what those were?” Gerry blithely replied.

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...

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.

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...

Libraries should be open to all – except the censor.[Response to questionnaire in Saturday Review, October 29 1960]

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

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...

They should be taking bonuses from bankers, not library books from schoolchildren. What kind of society are we building?

When I stepped into the brown-tiled entryway of the Kentwood Public Library, the sunlight flowing down on me from the high windows, I felt a sense of importance. It gratified me to be in a...

I was lost in a magical mystic world as I step into the old university library. This place I would say is the birth place of the ‘writer’ in me and still one of my...

I have an unshaken conviction that democracy can never be undermined if we maintain our library resources and a national intelligence capable of utilizing them.”[Letter to Herbert Putnam; in: Waters, Edward N.: Herbert Putnam: the...

CREATIONThe library is not a shrine for the worship of books. It is not a temple where literary incense must be burned or where one’s devotion to the bound book is expressed in ritual. A...

Before Gutenberg, libraries were small — the Cambridge University library had only 122 volumes in 1424, for instance; after Gutenberg literacy became widespread.

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...

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.”...

I finally found my way to the Really Restricted Section, where they keep the kind of books most scholars aren’t even supposed to know exist. I knocked on the closed door, said the proper passwords,...

She took particular comfort in certain familiar sights and sounds that marked her day: the buzz of the fluorescent lights, the pale figures sprawled silent and motionless over their reading, the reassuring feel of her...

There are many horrible sights in the multiverse. Somehow, though, to a soul attuned to the subtle rhythms of a library, there are few worse sights than a hole where a book ought to be.

The love of libraries, like most loves, must be learned.

The man who has a library of his own collection is able to contemplate himself objectively, and is justified in believing in his own existence.

I read,’ I say. ‘I study and read. I bet I’ve read everything you’ve read. Don’t think I haven’t. I consume libraries. I wear out spines and ROM drives. I do things like get in...

I love vast libraries; yet there is a doubt,If one be better with them or without,Unless he use them wisely, and, indeed,Knows the high art of what and how to read.