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...

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...

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

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.

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...

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

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...

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.

The loudest elderly women always had the quietest elderly husbands.

…killing rats wasn’t in my job description.

The International Institute of Islamic Thought and Civilization (ISTAC)… to establish a superior library reflecting the religious and intellectual traditions both of the Islamic and Western civilizations.

that Beast-just-gave-Beauty-a-whole-frickin’-library look and now she’s going to spin around like she can read them all at once through osmosis.

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

Blaming the library for exposure to pornography is like blaming the lake if your child walks up to it alone, falls in and then drowns. – David Sawyer, Spokesman-Review, 18 December 2000

I deserve a swift kick in the shorts for all the times I’ve stubbornly wound my way through the library stacks, my mule head leading the way, searching fruitlessly for information a librarian could put in my hands in a matter of minutes. – Michael Perry, Handbook for Freelance Writing

Doctor Who: You want weapons? We’re in a library. Books are the best weapon in the world. This room’s the greatest arsenal we could have. Arm yourself!(from Tooth and Claw in Season 2)

A library doesn’t need windows. A library is a window.

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...

Planting a flower’s like opening a book, because either way you’re starting something. And your garden’s your library.

he’ll expect to find us exactly where he left us, never mind how much his life has changed in the meantime.

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 better.

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

Rzeczywiście, często się zdarza, że idzie się do biblioteki, bo chce się książkę o znanym tytule, ale główną funkcją biblioteki, a przynajmniej funkcją biblioteki w moim domu i w domach wszystkich znajomych, jakich możemy odwiedzać, jest odkrywanie książek, których istnienia się nie podejrzewało, a które, jak się okazuje, są dla nas niezwykle ważne.

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 book cart as she wheeled it down the aisle, and the books themselves, symbols of order on their backs –...

Some people write letters, in the library.

And for the next long years of my life, I tried to remember only the reading, not the terrible things that happened to me as I came and went up and down the stairs. The library became my sanctuary. I loved the ways the precious stories took shape but always had room to be read...

I took to the Bodleian library as to a lover and … would sit long hours in Bodley’s arms to emerge, blinking and dazed with the small and feel of all those books.

For one crazy moment he had the notion of a vanished tribe of librarians, lost in the deep underground caverns of the Bodleian, a wild and savage tribe that fed on unwary travellers.

He was giving her the most important thing he could, the only way he knew how. He was a professor, a lover of stories, and he was building her a library in the same way other men might build their daughters houses.

If you’re frightened of the countless number of books in the library, you’ll never write anything, until you close your eyes and hold the pen.

We may sit in our library and yet be in all quarters of the earth.

There is a somewhat time-worn joke about people taking up library work because they like to read : the joke consisting of the fact that librarians have so little time to read. But, I tell you, those who do not, and there are some, are in the wrong profession.

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

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.) Libraries are a pillar of any society. I believe our lack of attention to funding and caring for them properly...

If peace had a smell,it would be the smell of a library full of old, leather-bound books.

A library’s function is to give the public in the quickest and cheapest way: information, inspiration, and recreation. If a better way than the book can be found, we should use it.

Those who spend the greater part of their time in reading or writing books are, of course, apt to take rather particular notice of accumulations of books when they come across them. They will not pass a stall, a shop, or even a bedroom-shelf without reading some title, and if they find themselves in an...

Your mind is your library of what you read.

The world is quiet here.

I have always kept a stack of library books next to my bed as a lifeline. If I ever woke in the middle of the night too scared to move or too sad to roll over, the books were my saviors.

Every time I went to the library, it felt like a treasure hunt: somewhere amid those dusty books was the answer, and all I had to do was find it.

Mikhail?…Try making suggestions next time, or just plain asking. You go do whatever it is you’re doing, and I’ll go search you extensive library for a book on manners.-You will not find it.-Why am I not surprised?

Desire overwhelmed me once she had gone. But it was not a desire for Homer. I had to return to the library. I could already smell the books’ muskiness and in my mind turned over pages with as many differing textures as a forest; pages that were brittle and fragile which had to be coaxed...

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

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

Oh God no. I’ve maybe read a third of ‘em. But I’m going to read them all. I call it my Life’s Library. Every summer since I was little, I’ve gone to garage sales and bought all the books that looked interesting. So I always have something to read.

When I was a child, it was a matter of pride that I could plow through a Nancy Drew story in one afternoon, and begin another in the evening. . . . I was probably trying to impress the librarians who kept me supplied with books.

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 woluminówPrzekracza liczbę ciał niebieskichCzy ziaren piasku na pustyni. Człowiek,Co chce ją wyczerpać,Traci rozum i zuchwałe oczy.Zawarta jest tu rozległa pamięć...

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.

Over the years I have collected so many books that, in aggregate, they can fairly be called a library.I don’t know what percentage of them I have read. Increasingly I wonder how many of them I ever will read. This has done nothing to dampen my pleasure in acquiring more books.