Libraries Quotes

when the press and problems of humanity become too much, I love to escape into books, where people are served up in digestible portions and can be pushed to one side when one is satiated.

~ Jane Wilson-Howarth

The librarian of today, and it will be true still more of the librarians of tomorrow, are not fiery dragons interposed between the people and the books. They are useful public servants, who manage libraries in the interest of the public... Many still think that a great reader, or a writer of books, will make an excellent librarian. This is pure fallacy.

~ William Osler

Information is valuable. Librarians and libraries are, at best incidental; at worst, in the way.

~ Donald A. Barclay

Morris tried to keep the books in some sort of order, but they always mixed themselves up. The tragedies needed cheering up and would visit with the comedies. The encyclopedias, weary of facts, would relax with the comic books and fictions. All in all it was an agreeable jumble.

~ William Joyce

Libraries are brothels for the mind. Which means that librarians are the madams, greeting punters, understanding their strange tastes and needs, and pimping their books.

~ Guy Browning

My Alma mater is the Chicago Public Library.

~ David Mamet

One of the many reasons I love libraries. Everyone is lost and not wanting to be found in a library.

~ Sarah Noffke

some libraries are no longer called libraries but are known as Learning Resource Centers or Media Centers. Librarians, however, are still generally known as librarians and not yet as Learning Resourcists or Media Centerists, though this may be only a matter of time.

~ Richard Armour

Librarians are on the front lines of an invisible struggle over our information diet and, for better or worse, the scales are not tipping in their direction.

~ Peter Morville

I became interested in librarians while researching my first book, about obituaries. With the exception of a few showy eccentrics, like the former soldier in Hitler's army who had a sex change and took up professional whistling, the most engaging obit subjects were librarians. An obituary of a librarian could be about anything under the sun, a woman with a phenomenal memory, who recalled the books her aging patrons read as children—and was also, incidentally, the best sailor on her stretch of the Maine coast—or a man obsessed with maps, who helped automate the Library of Congress's map catalog and paved the way for wonders like Google Maps.

~ Marilyn Johnson

Millions of pages cloaked in dust and inspiration and wisdom.

~ Sarah Noffke

In the nonstop tsunami of global information, librarians provide us with floaties and teach us how to swim. – Linton Weeks, Washington Post, 13 January 2001

~ Tatyana Eckstrand

In my world there would be as many public libraries as there are Starbucks.

~ Henry Rollins

You poor girl, what sort of aged, unfriendly Libraries have you met in short life? A silent Library is a sad Library ... A Library should be full of exclamations! ... A Library should be full of now-just-a-minutes and that-can't-be-rights and scientifick folk running skelter to prove somebody wrong... A Library should not shush ; it should roar !

~ Catherynne M. Valente

There were also very special or dangerous items that had to be fetched in person, or even by large parties of armed librarians.

~ Garth Nix

Shara was already an avid reader by then, but she had never realized until that moment what books meant, the possibility they presented: you could protect them forever, store them up like engineers store water, endless resources of time and knowledge snared in ink, tied down to paper, layered on shelves.... Moments made physical, untouchable, perfect, like preserving a dead hornet in crystal, one drop of venom forever hanging from its stinger.She felt overwhelmed. It was--she briefly thinks of herself and Vo, reading together in the library--a lot like being in love for the first time.

~ Robert Jackson Bennett

I liked the thought that the book I was now holding had been held by dozens of others.

~ Doris Kearns Goodwin

Libraries are always bigger on the inside because every book has an entire word inside of it.

~ Robert Arger

That the public library is a part of the educational system should never be lost sight of in the work of establishing it, or in its management. To the great mass of the people it comes as their first and only educational opportunity.

~ John Cotton Dana

The door of Reverend Verringer’s impressive manse is opened by an elderly female with a face like a pine plank; the Reverend is unmarried, and has need of an irreproachable housekeeper. Simon is ushered into the library. It is so self-consciously the right sort of library that he has an urge to set fire to it.

~ Margaret Atwood

People are often dismissive of librarians and libraries....But isn't that where the best stories are kept? Hidden away on the library bookshelves, lost and forgotten, waiting, waiting, until someone like me comes along, and wants to borrow them.

~ Justine Picardie

But I didn't mind. I loved that everything was cataloged and ready to go and that I was technically now living and sleeping in a library.

~ B.j. Novak

The high domed ceiling put me in mind of a skull, a brain, a mind. What did that make us, the readers?

~ Lia Mills

We have an obligation to support libraries. To use libraries, to encourage others to use libraries, to protest the closure of libraries. If you do not value libraries then you do not value information or culture or wisdom. You are silencing the voices of the past and you are damaging the future.We have an obligation to read aloud to our children. To read them things they enjoy. To read to them stories we are already tired of. To do the voices, to make it interesting, and not to stop reading to them just because they learn to read to themselves. Use reading-aloud time as bonding time, as time when no phones are being checked, when the distractions of the world are put aside.

~ Neil Gaiman

Papa thought that any book worth reading twice was worth owning. So instead of buying desserts, we bought books.

~ Natalie S. Bober

I walked inside and paused for a moment to breathe in the scent of paper and dust—the perfumes of knowledge.

~ Chloe Neill

Be careful. As if something’s going to jump us in a library.”“You might be surprised.”“What do you mean?”“You know how people say a book is really gripping?”“Don’t tell me…” Cat trailed off.“Libraries can be dangerous.

~ Max Gladstone

All libraries must submit to a certain order, I answered. Indeed, agreed the professor, or all will be lost. The fall of nations and empires begins with the fall of libraries.

~ Rawi Hage

She read her way around the library, hungry for journeys, adventures, laughter and passion. She took each new book to bed like a lover, savouring every chapter, going too far some nights until the letters danced like insects and she was groggy next day at work. But still she'd sneak away for lunchtime trysts, her eager fingers fumbling for the bookmark.

~ Cath Staincliffe

My parents, and librarians along the way, taught me about the space between words; about the margins, where so many juicy moments of life and spirit and friendship could be found. In a library, you could find miracles and truth and you might find something that would make you laugh so hard that you get shushed, in the friendliest way. There was sanctuary in a library, there is sanctuary now, from the war, from the storms of our family and our own anxious minds. Libraries are like the mountain, or the meadows behind the goat lady’s house: sacred s

~ Anne Lamott

There is a sad disconnectedness that overcomes a library when its owner is gone.

~ Lois Mcmaster Bujold

It was funny how none of her classes in library science has prepared her for this sort of thing, dead bodies, staff under suspicion, crazed reporters. Really, they needed to consider expanding the curriculum.

~ Jenn Mckinlay

A public library is the most enduring of memorials, the trustiest monument for the preservation of an event or a name or an affection; for it, and it only, is respected by wars and revolutions, and survives

~ Mark Twain

The library was quiet. It was busy but it was quiet and I thought it must be like this in a monastery where you had company and sympathy but your thoughts were your own.

~ Jeanette Winterson

For six months, then, Emma, at fifteen years of age, made her hands dirty with books from old lending libraries.

~ Gustave Flaubert

Impersonating a quiet, gentle librarian like Barbara Gordon--You deserve to be taken out of circulation!

~ Karl Kesel

When life seems not worth living, ten minutes in a library proves otherwise.

~ Miv Schaaf

...bookstores, libraries... they're the closest thing I have to a church.

~ Jim C. Hines

A library in the middle of a community is a cross between an emergency exit, a life raft and a festival. They are cathedrals of the mind; hospitals of the soul; theme parks of the imagination.

~ Caitlin Moran

The public library contains multitudes. And each person who visits contains multitudes as well. Each of us is a library of thoughts, memories, experiences, and odors. We adapt to one another to produce the human condition.

~ Josh Hanagarne