Libraries Quotes

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

~ William Shakespeare

There are many horrible sights in the multiverse. Somehow, though, to a soul attuned to the subtle rhythms of a library, there are few worse sights than a hole where a book ought to be.Someone had stolen a book.

~ Terry Pratchett

anyone who’s worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes him, and with extravagant enthusiasm.

~ Virginia Woolf

There were two sets of double doors leading out of the antechamber, one marked STACKS and the other TOMES. Not knowing the difference between the two, I headed to the ones labeled STACKS. That was what I wanted. Stacks of books. Great heaps of books. Shelf after endless shelf of books.

~ Patrick Rothfuss

Shelving books incorrectly is as good as stealing them. It's almost worse.

~ Paul Acampora

Epics are never written about libraries. They exist on whim it depends on if the conquering army likes to read.

~ Patricia A. Mckillip

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

~ Maud Hart Lovelace

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 brainless.

~ Terry Pratchett

This place is a mystery. A sanctuary. Every book, every volume you see, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it & the soul of those who read it & lived it & dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down it's pages, it's spirit grows & strengthens. In this place, books no longer remembered by anyone, books that are lost in time, live forever, waiting for the day when they will reach a new reader's hands, a new spirit...

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

From fire, water, the passage of time, neglectful readers, and the hand of the censor, each of my books has escaped to tell me its story.

~ Alberto Manguel

We'll always need printed books that don't mutate the way digital books do; we'll always need places to display books, auditoriums for book talks, circles for story time; we'll always need brick-and-mortar libraries.

~ Marilyn Johnson

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

~ Elizabeth Mccracken

Libraries are the future of reading. When the economy is down, we need to make it easier for people to buy and read books for free, not harder. It is stupid to sacrifice tomorrow’s book buyers for today’s dollars, especially when it’s obvious that the source in question doesn’t have any more dollars to give you.

~ Courtney Milan

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; he'll spend more on fiction than he does on food; he'll be more interested in his library than in his relationships, and, since few people are prepared to live in a place where every available surface is covered with piles of books, he'll often find himself alone, perhaps in the company of a neglected and malnourished cat. When he dies, all but forgotten, his body might fester for days before a curious neighbor grows concerned about the smell.

~ Mikita Brottman

For him that stealeth, or borroweth and returneth not, this book from its owner,Let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him. Let him be struck with palsy and all his members blasted. Let him languish in pain crying out for mercy, Let there be no surcease to his agony till he sink in dissolution. Let bookworms gnaw his entrails in token of the worm that dieth not.When at last he goeth to his final punishment, Let the flames of Hell consume him forever.[attributed to the Monastery of San Pedro in Barcelona, Spain]

~ Nicholas A. Basbanes

And Marianne, who had the knack of finding her way in every house to the library, however it might be avoided by the family in general, soon procured herself a book.

~ Jane Austen

No one stepping for the first time into a room made of books can know instinctively how to behave, what is expected, what is promised, what is allowed. One may be overcome by horror--at the cluster or the vastness, the stillness, the mocking reminder of everything one doesn't know, the surveillance--and some of that overwhelming feeling may cling on, even after the rituals and conventions are learned, the geography mapped, and the natives found friendly.

~ Alberto Manguel

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 remain the nurseries of heresy and independence of thought. They will, in fact, preserve that freedom which is a far more important part of our lives than any ideology or orthodoxy, the freedom that dissolves orthodoxies and inspires solutions to the ever-changing challenges of the future. I hope that your library and mine will continue in this way to be dangerous for many years to come.

~ Edmund S. Morgan

I always say, 'Books beat boredom,' said Amanda wisely.

~ Mo Willems

I love vast libraries; yet there is a doubt,If one be better with them or without,Unless he use them wisely, and, indeed,Knows the high art of what and how to read.

~ John Godfrey Saxe

...I am still librarian in your house, for I never was dismissed, and never gave up the office. Now I am librarian here as well.''But you have just told me you were sexton here!''So I am. It is much the same profession. Except you are a true sexton, books are but dead bodies to you, and a library nothing but a catacomb!

~ George Macdonald

Usually, I set one foot in a library and I feel my own internal volume lower. A library is a physical equivalent of a sigh. It’s the silence, sure, but it’s also the certainty of all those books, the way they stand side by side with their still, calm conviction. It’s the reassurance of knowledge in the face of confusion.

~ Deb Caletti

LibrariesAreNeccessaryGardens,UnsurpassedAtGrowingExcitement

~ J. Patrick Lewis

Now, public libraries are most admirable institutions, but they have one irritating custom. They want their books back.

~ Cecil B. Demille

You could never be certain what you would find in a book that had spent time with someone else.

~ Erica Bauermeister

Choosing a new book was like looking for treasure.

~ Kit Pearson

I personally find that for domestic purposes, the Trivial Pursuit system works better than Dewey.

~ Nick Hornby

On to the library. And all through his time at the card catalog, combing the shelves, filling out the request cards, he danced a silent, flirtatious minuet of the eyes with a rosy-cheeked redhead in the biology section, pages of notes spread before her. All his life, he had had a yen for women in libraries. In a cerebral setting, the physical becomes irresistible. Also, he figured he was really more likely to meet a better or at least more compatible woman in a library than in a saloon. Ought to have singles libraries, with soups and salads, Bach and Mozart, Montaignes bound in morocco; place to sip, smoke, and seduce in a classical setting, noon to midnight. Chaucer's Salons, call them, franchise chain.

~ Stephen Minkin

A library is a sacred place where the voices of the ancients can still be heard if we but give them the required silence.

~ James Rozoff

Trithemius' concern for conservation was rare, indeed, and is a lesson to modern library managers who discard printed volumes, believing that e-books are the only way of the future.

~ Roderick Cave

Browsing through the shelves in bookstores or libraries, I was completely happy.

~ Louis L'amour

She was a poetry book with the wrong dust jacket, shelved in the Reference section.

~ Joyce Rachelle

A library bears similar qualities to a hospital. Librarians are like doctors, books the prescriptions.

~ Trudy Wallis

And, the treasure? A library card: key to all the doors in the story world.

~ Trudy Wallis

Within a year or two, however, a couple of the first things I wrote – ‘Anarchy In The UK’ and ‘God Save The Queen’ – really hit their target. I’d like to thank the British public library system: that was my training ground, that’s where I learned to throw those verbal grenades. I wasn’t just throwing bricks through shop windows as a voice of rebellion, I was throwing words where they really mattered. Words count.

~ John Lydon

My mother explained the magic with this washing machine the very, very first day. She said, 'Now Hans, we have loaded the laundry. The machine will make the work. And now we can go to the library.' Because this is the magic: you load the laundry, and what do you get out of the machine? You get books out of the machines, children's books.

~ Hans Rosling

Good books are rare, and to have a really good library, a few shelves are all we need. When I was still on my campus in India, I was convinced, like many professors, that if the Lord was to be found anywhere, it was in the lower stacks of the library. But now - just as when I go into a big department store, I can say, How many things I don't need! How many expensive suits I don't want! - when I enter a big library I say, What tomes I don't have to read again! What folios I will never open! This feeling of freedom will come to all of us when we realise, in the depths of our meditation, that all wisdom lies within.

~ Eknath Easwaran

Libraries are sexual dream factories. The langour brings it on.

~ Siri Hustvedt

I have rooted myself into this quiet place where I don’t need much to get by. I need my visions. I need my books. I need new thoughts and lessons, from older souls, bars, whisky, libraries; different ones in different towns. I need my music. I need my songs. I need the safety of somewhere to rest my head at night, when my eyes get heavy. And I need space. Lots of space. To run, and sing, and change around in any way I please—outer or inner—and I need to love. I need the space to love ideas and thoughts; creations and people—anywhere I can find—and I need the peace of mind to understand it.

~ Charlotte Eriksson

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.

~ Lemony Snicket