Libraries are our friends.

Just as we may, through an appalled realization that we were unaware of what was going on in the mind of one we thought we knew, come to wonder how we ever know what another...

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

A book has been taken. A book has been taken? You summoned the Watch,” Carrot drew himself up proudly, “because someone’s taken a book? You think that’s worse than murder?”The Librarian gave him the kind...

Libraries, whether my own or shared with a greater reading public, have always seemed to me pleasantly mad places, and for as long as I can remember I’ve been seduced by their labyrinthine logic, which...

As for reading, I wish I had a magic door to a library where I could go in, read for days and days, and come back in the same minute I left. I’m still looking...

I was born, and then I was quietly resentful of that fact for a few years…but then I went to a library and it was okay.

If we didn’t already have libraries, they would now have to be invented. They are the keys to American success in fully exploiting the information superhighways of the future.

Before parents accept the wisdeom of a school board to cut school librarians, they should ask: Will my child graduate with a 21st-century resume, or a 19th-century transcript? . . . As the information landscape...

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.

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...

I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it’s better than college. People should educate themselves — you can get a complete education for no money. At...

Walking the stacks in a library, dragging your fingers across the spines — it’s hard not to feel the presence of sleeping spirits.

A library is a place where you learn what teachers were afraid to teach you.

I liked the thought that the book I was now holding had been held by dozens of others.

Controller Borasus sighed with relief. Libraries were not places of danger. It had to be a hoax.

Choosing a new book was like looking for treasure.

Should he give free reign to his desires, the bibliomaniac can ruin his life along with the lives of his loved ones. He’ll often take better care of his books than of his own health;...

Non che non creda in Dio. Ci credo. Solo non sono sicura di credere nel Paradiso, almeno non quanto credo nella biblioteca pubblica.

Librarians are tour-guides for all of knowledge.

Having fun isn’t hard when you’ve got a library card.”[Arthur]

Knowing I lov’d my books, he furnish’d me From mine own library with volumes that I prize above my dukedom.

One of the most subversive institutions in the United States is the public library..

Don’t mark up the Library’s copy, you fool! Librarians are Unprankable. They’ll track you down! They have skills!

Libraries are reservoirs of strength, grace and wit, reminders of order, calm and continuity, lakes of mental energy, neither warm nor cold, light nor dark … In any library in the world, I am at...

Don’t join the book burners. Don’t think you’re going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book…

A good library will never be too neat, or too dusty, because somebody will always be in it, taking books off the shelves and staying up late reading them.

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.

Rule number one: Don’t fuck with librarians.

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...

To know your way round a library is to master the whole of culture, i.e. the whole world.

He helped the Librarian up. There was a red glow in the ape’s eyes. It had tried to steal his books. This was probably the best proof any wizard could require that the trolleys were...

Entering a library, I am always stuck by the way in which a certain vision of the world is imposed upon the reader through its categories and its order.

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...

One of the nastier trends in library management in recent years is the notion that libraries should be ‘responsive to their patrons’.

If your library is not “unsafe,” it probably isn’t doing its job.

I have always had a special affinity for libraries and librarians, for the most obvious reasons. I love books. (One of my first Jobs was shelving books at a branch of the Chicago Public Library.)...

In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.

When I got [my] library card, that was when my life began.

Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future.

The great British Library –an immense collection of volumes of all ages and languages, many of which are now forgotten, and most of which are seldom read: one of these sequestered pools of obsolete literature...

I don’t think people realise how vital libraries are or what a colossal danger it would be if we were to lose any more. Having had a truncated school life myself, all of my education...

The only way to make a library safe is to lock people out of it. As long as they are allowed to read the books ‘any old time they have a mind to,’ libraries will...

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

Her library is a meeting place for all who love books. They discuss matters of the world and matters of the spirit.

Libraries allow children to ask questions about the world and find the answers. And the wonderful thing is that once a child learns to use a library, the doors to learning are always open.

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

I was a hugely unchaperoned reader, and I would wander into my local public library and there sat the world, waiting for me to look at it, to find out about it, to discover who...

Whatever the cost of our libraries, the price is cheap compared to that of an ignorant nation.

Society was the only threat to the sanctity of selfhood: an unpatroned library was an orderly library.