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 world around me, and I could feel my thoughts fluttering in the humid, salty breeze. At such moments, when the...

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 lady—was with us when we cleaned. She wore blue jeans, too. Maybe she was what people thought about when you...

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 the librarian, that was important to the library. Librarianswere only as important as the community they inspired. If Iwas going...

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 the community is hungry for more than just knowledge, then maybe it’s about time to open a snack bar.

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 to be trained in the art of librarianship. Sadly, this is not the case; its roots are a bit more...

The loudest elderly women always had the quietest elderly husbands.

…killing rats wasn’t in my job description.

Perhaps, Katrine, in a library just like this one, you will find that all the things you thought were impossible and all the things that everyone, throughout history, have thought were impossible are not really impossible at all… they never were impossible.

During the day, the library is a realm of order.

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 for the door.

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 scholarship starts, Garion. All the books in the world won’t help you if they’re just piled up in a heap.

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

I cannot comprehend the neglect of a family library in such days as these.”- Mr. Darcy

Sunny held Kit, and Violet held Klaus, and for a minute the four castaways did nothing but weep, letting their tears run down their faces and into the sea, which some have said is nothing but a library of all tears in history.

All I wanted to do was go back inside to the library and read a book.I used to spend all my time reading books, or watching television. It was safe. Nobody ever was hurt or teased or looked stupid while reading books or watching television.

Collect books, even if you don’t plan on reading them right away. Nothing is more important than an unread library.

An appetite for knowledge is apt to rush one off one’s feet, like any other appetite if not curbed. I often stand in the in the centre of the Library here and think despairingly how impossible it is ever to become possessed of all the wealth of facts and ideas contained in the books surrounding...

John Armato, a Public relations executive, cherishes his growing Library of Candidates. When people ask him if he’s actually read all those books, he asks them if they’ve actually eaten all the food in their kitchen. “It is good to put up a supply of books; it increases the odds that you’ll have what you...

My library is an archive of longings.

I like to imagine that, on the day after my last, my library and I will crumble together, so that even when I am no more I’ll still be with my books.

Anyone who thinks this world is without magic, hasn’t been to a library.

A public library is the most democratic thing in the world. What can be found there has undone dictators and tyrants: demagogues can persecute writers and tell them what to write as much as they like, but they cannot vanish what has been written in the past, though they try often enough…People who love literature...

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.

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

In the houses of the humble a little library in my opinion is a most precious possession.

Standing before the worn books and dusty shelves, she seemed like a ray of light in the windowless room.

Paradise will be a kind of library

But before [William Stoner] the future lay bright and certain and unchanging. He saw it, not as a flux of event and change and potentiality, but as a territory ahead that awaited his exploration. He saw it as the great University library, to which new wings might be built, to which new books might be...

Because I’m the kind of girl who fantasizes about being trapped in a library overnight.

We each contribute our own book to the great library of humanity.

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 behind them piles of small slim volumes of literary criticism.

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 saw one of the books at the library, so now they think the librarians are book fairies.

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 equaliser.

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 arrangement of computer codes. The librarian is the organizer, the animating spirit behind it, and the navigator. Her job is...

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 simultaneously, a girl should begin asking parents for books early in life, probably while still in the primary grades…

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 the eye, set them back on the shelves with your own hands, arrange them on your own plan so that...

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 was going to tell him. I struggled to come up with a reply, but the best I could muster was,...

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 to be among books, glancing at one here, reading a page from one over there, enjoying them all as objects...

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 on the way to celebrate the boat race, a magic that came from ignoring it a thousand times a day...

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 resting between the covers. Breathing it in, I glance through a few pages before returning each book to its shelf.