Libraries Quotes

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)

~ Larry Brown

Library-denigrators, pay heed: suggesting that the Internet is a viable substitute for libraries is like saying porn could replace your wife.

~ Joanne Harris

A library is a different kind of social reality (of the three dimensional kind), which by its very existence teaches a system of values beyond the fiscal.

~ Zadie Smith

This is overdue. Quite a bit, I'm afraid. I apologize. We moved to Topeka when I was very small, and Mother accidentally packed it up with the linens. I have traveled a long way to return it, and I know the fine must be large, but I have no money. As it is a book of fairy tales, I thought payment of a first-born child would be acceptable. I always loved the library. I'm sure she'll be happy there.

~ Ellen Klages

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 the end of 10 years, I had read every book in the library and I'd written a thousand stories.

~ Ray Bradbury

Ben wished the world was organized by the Dewey decimal system. That way you'd be able to find whatever you were looking for.

~ Brian Selznick

She sounds like someone who spends a lot of time in libraries, which are the best sorts of people.

~ Catherynne M. Valente

Librarians are the coolest people out there doing the hardest job out there on the frontlines. And every time I get to encounter or work with librarians, I'm always impressed by their sheer awesomeness.

~ Neil Gaiman

Libraries really are wonderful. They're better than bookshops, even. I mean bookshops make a profit on selling you books, but libraries just sit there lending you books quietly out of the goodness of their hearts.

~ Jo Walton

It's still National Library Week. You should be especially nice to a librarian today, or tomorrow. Sometime this week, anyway. Probably the librarians would like tea. Or chocolates. Or a reliable source of funding.

~ Neil Gaiman

People flock in, nevertheless, in search of answers to those questions only librarians are considered to be able to answer, such as Is this the laundry? How do you spell surreptitious? and, on a regular basis, Do you have a book I remember reading once? It had a red cover and it turned out they were twins.

~ Terry Pratchett

Wizards and computers get along about as well as flamethrowers and libraries.

~ Jim Butcher

When the going gets tough, the tough get a librarian.

~ Joan Bauer

In the nonstop tsunami of global information, librarians provide us with floaties and teach us to swim.

~ Linton Weeks

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 the life of a community in a way that makes it indispensable. A great library is one nobody notices because it is always there, and always has what people need.

~ Vicki Myron

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

~ Bell Hooks

You don't spend your life hanging around books without learning a thing or two.

~ Lemony Snicket

When you steal from the library, you are preventing anyone else from reading that book, and the very notion makes me want to drop you in the Void.

~ Piers Anthony

To ask why we need libraries at all, when there is so much information available elsewhere, is about as sensible as asking if roadmaps are necessary now that there are so very many r

~ Jon Bing

I do not understand people who will lustily throw $40,000 at the shiny red automobile of their choice, but well up with tears and become outraged when they are asked to pay $5 for a damaged videotape. Either they are fucked up and their priorities are fucked up or I am fucked up and my priorities are fucked up. Because I am me, I think it is them.

~ Don Borchert

I am convinced that grandkids are inherently evil people who tell their grandparents to just go to the library and open up an e-mail account - it's free and so simple.

~ Scott Douglas

Every reader his or her book.Every book its reader.

~ S.r. Ranganathan

I like libraries. It's a comfort that knowledge can be save for so long. That what we learn can be passed on.

~ Jackson Pearce

I fall in love with any girl who smells of library paste.

~ Charles M. Schulz

You must live feverishly in a library. Colleges are not going to do any good unless you are raised and live in a library everyday of your life.

~ Ray Bradbury

Great. He was a hottie, a good kisser, and a literature buff. God really must have had a sense of humor, because if I had to name my biggest turn-on, it was literature. And he had just recommended a book that I didn’t know, that wasn’t taught in school. If I were single, there would be no better pick-up line. Suddenly, I found myself thinking back to Atonement—you know, the scene in the book where the two main characters have sex in the library? Even though Chloe said doing it against bookshelves would be really uncomfortable (and she’d probably know), it was still a fantasy of mine. Like, what’s more romantic than a quiet place full of books? But I shouldn’t have been thinking about my library fantasies. Especially while I was staring at Cash. In the middle of a library.

~ Kody Keplinger

She was brilliant and joyous and she believed- probably correctly- that libraries contain the answers to all things, to everything, and that if you can't find the information you seek in the library, then such information probably doesn't exist in this or any parallel universe now or ever to be known. She was thoughtful and kind and she always believed the best of everybody. She was, above all else, a master librarian and she knew where to find any book on any subject in the shortest possible time. And she was wonderfully unhinged.

~ Gary Paulsen

Shout for libraries. Shout for the young readers who use them.

~ Patrick Ness

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

~ Connie Willis

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

~ Diana Wynne Jones

Most people either love or hate old libraries. To some, a room like this--dim, high-ceilinged, dusty, smelling of old paper and crumbling leather--would be oppressive, a place to flee from in search of sun and air. To others, like me, it was a wonderful cave filled with unimaginable treasures and unexpected treats. I always found myself inhaling deeply when I entered the stacks, as if trying to absorb part of them into my bloodstream.

~ Sheila Connolly

The library card is a passport to wonders and miracles, glimpses into other lives, religions, experiences, the hopes and dreams and strivings of ALL human beings, and it is this passport that opens our eyes and hearts to the world beyond our front doors, that is one of our best hopes against tyranny, xenophobia, hopelessness, despair, anarchy, and ignorance.

~ Libba Bray

Libraries are as the shrine where all the relics of the ancient saints, full of true virtue, and that without delusion or imposture, are preserved and reposed.

~ Bacon

The bookshop felt damp and chilly, but it was still and unsupervised bookshop, and Anna felt a frisson of excitement as she scanned the shelves with greedy eyes. Libraries weren't quite the same, she'd found; something about the prosaic smell of other people's houses and fingers seeping off the pages diluted that sense of magical worlds, but untouched, unread, unexplored books were something else.

~ Lucy Dillon

Librarians have always been among the most thoughtful and helpful people. They are teachers without a classroom. No libraries, no progress.

~ Willard Scott

My mother lived alone in the ruins of the great Library, which was called Compleat, and a very passionate and dashing Library indeed. Under the slightly blackened rafters and more than slightly caved-in walls, my mother lived and read and dreamed, allowing herself to grow closer and closer to Compleat, to notice more and more how fine and straight his shelves remained, despite great structural stress. That sort of moral fortitude is rare in this day and age. By and by, my siblings and I were born and romped on the balconies, raced up and down the splintered ladders, and pored over many encyclopedias and exciting novels. I know just everything about everything—so long as it beings with A through L.

~ Catherynne M. Valente

‎The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.

~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

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

~ Jeanette Winter

Libraries have always been there for me. Of course I'll stand up for them.

~ Marilyn Johnson

Speaking of libraries: A big open-stack academic or public library is no small pleasure to work in. You're, say, trying to do a piece on something in Nevada, and you go down to C Floor, deep in the earth, and out to what a miner would call a remote working face. You find 10995.497S just where the card catalog and the online computer thought it would be, but that is only the initial nick. The book you knew about has led you to others you did not know about. To the ceiling the shelves are loaded with books about Nevada. You pull them down, one at a time, and sit on the floor and look them over until you are sitting on a pile five feet high, at which point you are late home for dinner and you get up and walk away. It's an incomparable boon to research, all that; but it is also a reason why there are almost no large open-stack libraries left in the world.

~ John Mcphee