Library? That sounded reasonable. As my thoughts revolved around my days surrounded by books, something miraculous happened. My anger subsided. It ebbed away as the thoughts of books, pages, and comfort entered my head.

The weight of absence is as much a feature of any library as the constriction of order and space.

To build up a library is to create a life. It’s never just a random collection of books.

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...

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...

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.

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,...

The library in summer is the most wonderful thing because there you get books on any subject and read them each for only as long as they hold your interest, abandoning any that don’t, halfway...

People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.

Libraries store the energy that fuels the imagination. They open up windows to the world and inspire us to explore and achieve, and contribute to improving our quality of life. Libraries change lives for the...

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.

You are a total stranger and you want to take my library book.

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...

fires”!

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...

In Bibliotheken fühlt man sich wie in Gegenwart eines großen Kapitals, das geräuschlos unberechenbare Zinsen spendet.

Shout for libraries. Shout for the young readers who use them.

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

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,...

I find that when I come out of the library I’m in what I call the library bliss of being totally taken away from the distractions of life.”[Woman’s Day magazine, March 12, 2002]

A library outranks any other one thing a community can do to benefit its people. It is a never failing spring in the desert.

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...

The old man was peering intently at the shelves. ‘I’ll have to admit that he’s a very competent scholar.’Isn’t he just a librarian?’ Garion asked, ‘somebody who looks after books?’That’s where all the rest of...

In the enterprise, you already have all these libraries, but a lot of midsized companies want smaller automated tape products. The PX500 series plays into that market — the lower end.

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

Library-denigrators, pay heed: suggesting that the Internet is a viable substitute for libraries is like saying porn could replace your wife.

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.

Forgive, I hope you won’t be upset, but when I was a boy I used to look up and see you behind your desk, so near but far away, and, how can I say this,...

I ransack public libraries, and find them full of sunk treasure.

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...

Libraries are the mainstays of democracy. The first thing dictators do when taking over a country is close all the libraries, because libraries are full of ideas and differences of opinion, all the things we...

The acquisition of a book signalled not just the potential acquisition of knowledge but also something like the property rights to a piece of ground: the knowledge became a visitable place.

My Alma mater is the Chicago Public Library.

Instead of keeping it in private hands on some wall someplace, this will travel to schools, to libraries in 50 states.

‎The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.

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.

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

In the libraryI search for a good book.We have many books,says Mrs. Rose, the librarian,and ALL of them are good.Of course she says that. It’s her job.But do I want to read about TrucksTrains and...

Come to the feast.”Whitechapel Library, Aldgate East.

The idea of a library full of books, the books full of knowledge, fills me with fear and love and courage and endless wonder.

What a school thinks about its library is a measure of what it feels about education.

The librarian was explaining the benefits of the Dewey decimal system to her junior—benefits that extended to every area of life. It was orderly, like the universe. It had logic. It was dependable. Using it...

Betsy returned to her chair, took off her coat and hat, opened her book and forgot the world again.

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

Libraries are not facing crisis, they are in crisis.

Librarians have always been among the most thoughtful and helpful people. They are teachers without a classroom. No libraries, no progress.

Every reader his or her book.Every book its reader.

Una biblioteca raffinata è come un intestino. Bisogna stare molto attenti a cosa ci si mette dentro. Si prende in considerazione soltanto ciò che è opportuno. Se in una biblioteca di questo genere dovesse capitare...

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...

A silent Library is a sad Library. A Library without patrons on whom to pile books and tales and knowing and magazines full of up-to-the-minute politickal fashions and atlases and plays in pentameter! A Library...