Fourteen is the age when time first starts to make its presence felt. Time took on such a variety of hues in those days that even my frozen mind sometimes reflected the colours of the...

It’s remarkable that a device, which fits in your pocket, can hold thousands of books. But a room full of books is an entirely different kind of remarkable.

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.

They have schools for librarians? Do they teach you how to properly sssh people?

We don’t have to destroy the library of the past. We just need to give it a face-lift.

A library was nothing without its people. You say library and there’s this iconoclastic image of an old-lady librarian telling people to be quiet and not to run. But the thing was, that lady—that iconoclastic...

There’s something deep in the heart of every person that wantsto protect culture. The only thing about my pending career thatwas changed because of 9/11 was that I began to see it was the community,not...

To be great at something, you must look to the great ones of thepast and improve on the ideas and techniques that they started. Iwas motivated to do better—to improve on the ideas of others.

It took a bit of popcorn and a library snack bar to make me realize that being a librarian was about more than just giving people information. It was about serving a community. And if...

I like to imagine that library school was started because of some sort of silly bar bet where a guy got really plastered and told his buddy that he could convince people that librarians needed...

The loudest elderly women always had the quietest elderly husbands.

…killing rats wasn’t in my job description.

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.

The contents of someone’s bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.”(About Books; Recoiling, Rereading, Retelling, New York Times, February 22, 1987)

Nick chided a censor, who wished some books gone, and suggested she scan Fahrenheit 451. For the book-budget cutters, Old Claus had no plan, cause if they could read, they just read Ayn Rand.

Do you ever hide books you’ve read over and over again because you’re so sick of them?”Oh, definitely. When they ask for them, I say the book fairy came to get it. One time they...

When you are growing up there are two institutional places that affect you most powerfully: the church, which belongs to God, and the public library, which belongs to you. The public library is a great...

A library is a place to go for a reality check, a bracing dose of literature, or a “true reflection of our history,” whether it’s a brick-and-mortar building constructed a century ago or a fanciful...

All my life, the library has always been one of my favorite places to go. (Larry Brown: A Writer’s Life by Jean W. Cash)

Every girl who aspires ultimately to outfit her own home should assemble a library on architectural styles and on furniture both traditional and modern. As few brides can buy expensively illustrated volumes and household equipment...

If you cannot read all your books, at any rate handle, or as it were, fondle them – peer into them, let them fall open where they will, read from the first sentence that arrests...

Plenty of patrons had asked me strange things, but this was the first who asked me where my car was parked. It was almost comical to look at the man, because he actually thought I...

Few pleasures, for the true reader, rival the pleasure of browsing unhurriedly among books: old books, new books, library books, other people’s books, one’s own books – it does not matter whose or where. Simply...

Like Petrach’s, my books know infinitely more than I do, and I’m grateful that they even tolerate my presence. At times I feel that I abuse the privilege.

The Bodleian above anything else made Oxford what it was . . . There was something incommunicably grand about it, something difficult to understand unless you had spent your evenings there or walked past it...

He liked bookstores, and libraries too. They had a sacred, peaceful hush, like graveyards without the shadow of death.

Who wants a library full of books you’ve already read?

When I open them, most of the books have the smell of an earlier time leaking out between the pages – a special odor of the knowledge and emotions that for ages have been calmly...

You cannot have a really terrific library without at least one terrific librarian, the way you cannot have a really terrific bedroom unless you can lock the door.

I wanted a library like this…[] A cave of words that I’d made myself.

Nothing is more impotent than an unread library.

The porter spends his days in the Library keeping strict vigil over this catacomb of books, passing along between the shelves and yet never paying heed to the almost audible susurrus of desire- the desire...

Corliss wondered what happens to a book that sits unread on a library shelf for thirty years. Can a book rightfully be called a book if it never gets read?…’How many books never get checked...

My library is an archive of longings.

I observed on most collected stones the imprints of innumerable plant fragments which were so different from those which are growing in the Lyonnais, in the nearby provinces, and even in the rest of France,...

Jamás vendas la biblioteca;si un día quieres deshacerte de ella, dónde, regalala a una escuela, reparte la en la glorieta del metro Insurgentes. Hay muchos que quieren leer y no tienen cómo pagar por los...

We have all sorts of conditions of booksellers: one is fanatic on the subject of libraries. He thinks that every public library should be dynamited. Another thinks that moving pictures will destroy the book trade....

Intellectual death is endemic in areas where people are unprepared to obtain new information for development. Learning is a way of staying alive.

Naked Lunch” that day, but the cafeteria served us all clothing. I like my meals a little more scandalous. I should eat in the library, along with the other gluttonous nudists.

They say that Caliph Omar, when consulted about what had to be done with the library of Alexandria, answered as follows: ‘If the books of this library contain matters opposed to the Koran, they are...

The library serves as a gathering place for friends whoshare the love of books. It further serves as a resource for those who escape the pressure of everydaylife, doing it by losing themselves in the...

Od pierwszego Adama, który ujrzał noc,I dzień, i kształt swojej dłoni,Ludzie snuli opowieści i utrwalaliW kamieniu, w metalu czy na pergaminieTo wszystko, co zawiera ziemia czy co tworzy sen.Oto ich dzieło: Biblioteka.Powiadają, że liczba jej...

Library stacks from this perspective are not a repository; they are a crowd.

I always get lost in the library,’ he said, ‘no matter how many times I go. In fact, I think I get lost there more, the more that I go. Like it’s getting to know...

Is there anything so delicious as the first exploration of a great library – alone – unwatched?

Several times he had to flatten himself against the shelves as a thesaurus thundered by. He waited patiently as a herd of Critters crawled past, grazing on the contents of the choicer books and leaving...

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

Knowledge is free at the library. Just bring your own container.

Twas a cold Yuletide evening, and I wandered the stacks, shelving multiple titles that the patrons brought back. We toiled overtime at our library here, ’cause the powers that be cut our staffing this year.

I will tell everyone I know to come [to the library]. This place saves lives.