Libraries Quotes

I was pretty sure I'd just had a nerdgasm.

~ Nicole Peeler

She wore heavy sandals, with socks. No kid in the entire state of Mississippi wore black socks in the summer. Shoot, if I wasn't standing smack-dab in the middle of the library, I wouldn't be wearing shoes.

~ Augusta Scattergood

I told him. We got a library here. Got plenty of good books, too. -Larry Brown, Dirty Work

~ Larry Brown

It was a common complaint amongst the Arts students that their library was in dire need of refurbishment. To call the old building shabby chic was being kind. It didn’t have automated stacks or self-service machines like the Management and Sciences library the other side of campus and the carpets and bookcases looked like they were probably the Victorian originals. But on days like this one, where the springtime sunshine streamed in through the high windows and set the dust motes dancing, Harriet sincerely felt that those BSc lot could stuff their vending machines and state of the art study pods. The Old Library was clearly suited for those who had poetry in their souls, rather than numbers in their heads.

~ Erin Lawless

I walked straight to the library. Mrs. Bloom, the librarian, always knows everything.

~ Augusta Scattergood

For the rest of the afternoon, Miss Bloom smiled almost as bright as the big yellow sun shining through the front picture window. Her library was filled up with people who loved books.

~ Augusta Scattergood

An ancient mustiness padded the air, tinged with with an acrid scent-a trace of the war between paper and oxygen, played out in slow inexorable burn that would one day crumble this empire to dust. -page 62

~ Jennifer Lee Carrell

Inside the front flap of the book were handwritten names of the dozen or so people who had checked the book out before Naomi. Instead of writing her name, Naomi had a thin paper receipt with the due date printed on it. She could never possess this book the way those other people had. It was one of those uselessly nostalgic and sentimental thoughts that serve only our own romantic ideals, but I couldn't help believing it was true nonetheless. I took a pencil out from behind the register and handed it to her.

~ Dinaw Mengestu

Believe it or not working in libraries is very similar to working on an ambulance or a fire truck. You take care of a lot of homeless people, you sometimes have to clean up things that require latex gloves, you always wear comfortable shoes, and you put out a lot of “fires”!

~ Lori Reed

Massive changes may have occurred in libraries in recent years, with new digital resources and services supplementing the old traditional resources and services, the dog-eared card catalogues ripped up and destroyed, workstations suddenly everywhere, but one essential aspect of “libraryness” has not changed: libraries remain places dedicated to storage. Books continue to be published in greater and greater numbers – so great in fact that there are no accurate figures as to exactly how many are published: some say one every thirty seconds, others four thousand per day, others a million per year – and somehow, whether through the off-site storage of the physical books themselves, or microfilm copying, or digital scanning, we remain obliged to keep up with or afloat in this vast deluge of paper. Even the new, high-tech rebranded libraries opened to great fanfare in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets in the 1990s could not get away from this essential fact of paper hoarding: they were called “Idea Stores.” - p.56

~ Ian Sansom

In his library he had been always sure of leisure and tranquility; and though prepared, as he told Elizabeth, to meet with folly and conceit in every other room in the house, he was used to be free from them there

~ Jane Austen

All across America public libraries were, and are, being shut down, while prisons-with libraries-were, and are, being built. This has been a choice the American public has been making for over thirty years.

~ Avi Steinberg