Libraries Quotes

It’s always the end of the world,” said Russell Grandinetti, one of Amazon’s top executives. “You could set your watch on it arriving.” He pointed out, though, that the landscape was in some ways changing for the first time since Gutenberg invented the modern book nearly 600 years ago. “The only really necessary people in the publishing process now are the writer and reader,” he said. “Everyone who stands between those two has both risk and opportunity.” Amazon Signs Up Authors, Writing Publishers Out of Deal. New York Times, 10/16/2011

~ Russell Grandinetti

Librarians who are arguing and lobbying for clever e-book lending solutions are completely missing the point. They are defending the library-as-warehouse concept, as opposed to fighting for the future, which is librarian as producer, concierge, connector, teacher, and impresario.

~ Seth Godin

THOMASINA:But then the Egyptian noodle made carnal embrace with the enemy who burned the great library of Alexandria without so much as a fine for all that is overdue!

~ Tom Stoppard

But the central branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library was still a place of wonders to Tess, even if the book budget had been slashed and the hours cut. Her parents had made a lot of mistakes, a fact Tess compulsively shared on first dates, but she gave them credit for doing one thing right: Starting when she was eight, they gave her a library card and dropped her off at the downtown Pratt every Saturday while they shopped. Twenty-one years later, Tess still entered through the children's entrance on the side, pausing to toss a penny in the algae-coated fish pond, then climbing the stairs to the main hall. If she could be married here, she would.

~ Laura Lippman

Book lovers love books! her mother announced. There's romance about the books- even having them seems to have a kind of excitement.from Mr. Linden's Library by Walter Dean Myers

~ Chris Van Allsburg

The woman at the desk was a university graduate, young, colourless, spectacled, and intensely disagreeable. She had a fixed suspicion that no one — at least, no male person — ever consulted works of reference except in search of pornography. As soon as you approached she pierced you through and through with a flash of her pince-nez and let you know that your dirty secret was no secret from HER. After all, all works of reference are pornographical, except perhaps Whitaker’s Almanack. You can put even the Oxford Dictionary to evil purposes by looking up words like —— and ——.

~ George Orwell

Libraries are not facing crisis, they are in crisis.

~ Patrick Ness

My guess is (it will be) about 300 years until computers are as good as, say, your local reference library in search.

~ Craig Silverstein

The most important thing of all was not the poverty of its ess

~ David Drake

in principle and reality, libraries are life-enhancing palaces of wonder

~ Gail Honeyman

There's so much proscription in the lives of young people, and it's so vital to have a place that says, look, here are the doors onto the world and amazingly, you're free to choose any one you like. - Patrick Ness on Libraries

~ Patrick Ness

...it's appalling to remember that the entire Oxford University Library was sold for scrap in the mid-1500s. Nor was that situation unique to Oxford, as libraries were deconstructed throughout the land.

~ Owen Gingerich

Late fees are the enemy of early literacy because instead of promoting responsible behavior, they suppress library visits for some of the people who need the institution the most. And of course these fees don't promote children being more responsible, but only reveal to children how irresponsible, ignorant, or unaware their own parents are. -- Amy Dickinson

~ Kyle Cassidy

I thought I appreciated books, but this was an alter to the book gods. It was hard not to be impressed. I didn't know what had the most impact: the rosewood shelving, the rolling library ladders, the mezzanine floor with the ornate spiral wrought-iron staircases at each end, the carved moldings, the scent of well-loved books, or the silky Aubusson rugs in a soft faded palette of rose, sage and aqua.

~ Victoria Abbott

the rent is a little higher herebut so far I've been able to pay itand that's a miracle toolike still maybe being sanewhile thinking of guns and sidewalksand old ladies in libraries.

~ Charles Bukowski

The library in 2020 will be ruled by geeks. In my happy vision for the future, libraries are ruled by benign geek librarian overlords and the world is full of awesome.

~ Sarah Houghton

There is a value to books—unhackable, paper books—that measures far beyond mere ink and paper.

~ Richard Due

Depriving our communities of libraries will deprive our society of its ability to survive. - Neil Gaiman

~ Kyle Cassidy

She liked books, but the hours spent in small-town libraries were tedious, and she began the first list when she was eight or nine as a means of distraction. A list of names, eventually expanding to ten or twelve pages: Lilia, Gabriel, Anna, Michelle. In every town her name was different.

~ Emily St. John Mandel

You get a lot of borderline cases in libraries.

~ Anita Brookner

A recurring theme in the book is instinct versus articulation. Although teen services people may know and understand issues on an instinctive level, they must be prepared to articulate these ideas in the face of threats to teen services.

~ Jennifer Velásquez

It's night in the Free People's World Tree Library. All the librarians are asleep, ... between the pages of their enchanted novels.

~ Kelly Link

The curtains were blood-red and drawn. This was not an office. It was a small library, two storeys high, with thin ladders and impractical balconies and an expansive ceiling featuring a gaggle of naked Greeks. It was the sort of library you'd marry a man for.

~ Catherine Lowell

It had always been my habit-- privately I felt it to be an ecstasy-- to enter, as into a mysterious vault, any public library. I was drawn to books that had been read before, novels that girls like myself had cradled and cherished. In my mind-- I suppose in my isolation-- I seized on all those previous readers, and everyone who would read after me, as phantom companions and secret friends.

~ Cynthia Ozick

Libraries are a tremendous and valuable resource, and I'm note sure it's possible to have too many of them.

~ Ann Leckie

A school library is like the Bat Cave: it's a safe fortress in a chaotic world, a source of knowledge and the lair of a superhero. True, the superhero is more likely to be wearing a cardigan than a batsuit, but still...

~ Tom Angleberger

Destiny smells of dust and the libraries of the night.

~ Neil Gaiman

Destiny smells of dust and the libraries of night.

~ Neil Gaiman

Marie's loud protestations about the lack of black history celebrations in town had resulted in a sheepish and hastily thrown together assembly each year at the public library, where all the while children and Adia sang praises to peanuts and open-heart surgery and air-conditioning underneath a store-printed banner that read THE WONDERS OF BLACK INNOVATION.

~ Kaitlyn Greenidge

You don't learn about war by sitting in libraries. Though if people spent more time in libraries, maybe there would be fewer wars.

~ Joanne Hall

The pursuit of knowing was freedom to me, the right to declare your own curiosities and follow them through all manner of books. I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people’s interests. The library was open, unending, free. Slowly, I was discovering myself.

~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people's interests. The library is open, unending, free.

~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

I remember as a very young child being warned that libraries and bookstores were quiet places where noise wasn’t allowed. Here was yet another thing the adults had gotten wrong, for these book houses pulsed with sounds; they just weren’t noisy. The books hummed. The collective noise they made was like riding on a large boat where the motor’s steady thrum and tickle vibrated below one’s sneakers, ignorable until you listened, then omnipresent and relentless, the sound that carried you forward. Each book brimmed with noises it wanted to make inside your head the moment you opened it; only the shut covers prevented it from shouting ideas, impulses, proverbs, and plots into that sterile silence.

~ Wendy Welch

Neil Gaiman on librarians as knowledge navigators over time.“And information was hard to find. And it was hard to find because it was like a flower growing in a desert – you had a long way to walk, but a librarian could take you to the flower. Now it’s more like flowers growing in the Amazon jungle and you’re trying to find a specific flower,” Gaiman said. “Anyone who has spent 5 minutes Googling for information and just sees the amount of noise out there starts to realize that actually someone who knows what they’re doing is incredibly useful. And librarians know what they’re doing.

~ Neil Gaiman

There is no fighting in the Library. Anyone who starts a fight or responds to a challenge will be thrown out. You may think you can take me. You're probably right. But none of you can take the Library.

~ Seanan Mcguire

At the moment that we persuade a child, any child, to cross that threshold, that magic threshold into a library, we change their lives forever, for the better.

~ Barack Obama

I am often asked a stock question: 'Have you actually read all those books?' To this I have my answer ready: 'Is there anybody who has read all the books in his library?' That would be like claiming to enjoy the incredible luxury and good fortune of being able to accomplish everything in this life that one would wish.

~ Konstantinos Staikos

They could take the money from building enough nukes to kill all the Russians in the world and give it to libraries. What good does an independent nuclear deterrent do Britain, compared to the good of libraries?

~ Jo Walton

The Leningrad Public Library remained open throughout the siege and became a place for people to congregate. People came to the library to read, even when weak from cold and exhaustion . . . Some died in their places, with a book propped in front of them . . . In the course of the war, the librarians greatly expanded the collection, purchasing books from the starving, who were desperate to sell anything for food. Some of the city's librarians scoured bombed ruins for volumes, scrabbling over the piles of brick with their backpacks full of salvaged books.

~ M.t. Anderson

I tell you, if you feel strange, strange things will happen to you: Fallen peacocks on library shelves

~ Rita Dove