Library Quotes

If you read great literature every day, you will uplift your spirit, soul and self.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Time has become quiet flexible inside the library. (This is true of most places with interesting books. Sit down to read for twenty minutes, and suddenly it's dark, with no clue as to where the hours have gone.)

~ Ellen Klages

There are so many books to read. What a paradise!

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

It is possible that librarians will be robots, controlled by Master Minds having mastery of a master computer at the Library of Congress.Or there will be no libraries and librarians, flesh-and-blood or otherwise. The onetime library patron will press a button and turn a dial on his TV, whereupon the requested book, in the desired language, will appear on the screen, the pages turning at the designated speed.

~ Richard Armour

I can hear the library humming in the night, a choir of authors murmuring inside their books along the unlit, alphabetical shelves, Giovanni Pontano next to Pope, Dumas next to his son, each one stitched into his own private coat, together forming a low, gigantic chord of language.

~ Billy Collins

All photos speak a thousand words. This one contained a library.

~ Rivera Sun

We are bees then, our honey is language.

~ Robert Bly

Words have power, you understand? It is in the nature of our universe. Our library itself distorts time and space on quite a grand scale. Well, when the Post Office started accumulating letters, it was storing words. In fact, what was being created was what we call a 'gevaisa', a tomb of living words.

~ Terry Pratchett

It is better to buy than burrow books.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

I love to buying books to create my sacred library.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

I live within the world of books.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Passion for books is the desire to read.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

All that is necessary for a student is access to a library.

~ Thomas Jefferson

Intellectual death is endemic in areas where people are unprepared to obtain new information for development. Learning is a way of staying alive.

~ Israelmore Ayivor

Yes, we know you are a graduate with PhD. But when was the last time you chase after a book shop to buy and read a book at your own volition to obtain an information for your self-development? Knowledge doesn't chase people; people chase knowledge and information.

~ Israelmore Ayivor

For a long while they are silent, thinking about abstract things like control and what it means to love an institution that is defined by loss, because a library is such a space and their duty is to encourage the books to leave.

~ Lindsey Drager

Every one of us is losing something precious to us. Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back again. That’s what part of it means to be alive. But inside our heads — at least that’s where I imagine it — there’s a little room where we store those memories. A room like the stacks in this library. And to understand the workings of our own heart we have to keep on making new reference cards. We have to dust things off every once in a while, let fresh air in, change the water in the flower vases. In other words, you’ll live for ever in your own private library.

~ Haruki Murakami

What would I have done without books?

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Without further ado I left the place, finding my route by the marks I had made on the way in. As I walked in the dark through the tunnels and tunnels of books, I could not help being overcome by a sense of sadness. I couldn't help thinking that if I, by pure chance, had found a whole universe in a single unknown book, buried in that endless necropolis, tens of thousands more would remain unexplored, forgotten forever. I felt myself surrounded by millions of abandoned pages, by worlds and souls without an owner sinking in an ocean of darkness, while the world that throbbed outside the library seemed to be losing its memory, day after day, unknowingly, feeling all the wiser the more it forgot.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

He looks at me, and I don't know what he sees. I used to think it was Rose. But she's not here with us now, in this room. It's just him and me, and the books. I feel like our lives are in those books. I feel like all the words on the pages are for us.

~ Lauren Destefano

It is that kind of thinking that is the problem; that movies, video games and the Internet, devices that simply amuse the imagination are more interesting than what a library stocks.

~ S.a. Tawks

The library turned out to be a very pleasant place, but it was not the comfortable chairs, the huge wooden bookshelves, or the hush of people reading that made the three siblings feel so good as they walked into the room. It is useless for me to tell you all about the brass lamps in the shapes of different fish, or the bright blue curtains that rippled like water as a breeze came in from the window, because although these were wonderful things they were no what made the three children smile. The Quagmire triplets were smiling, too, and although I have not researched the Quagmires nearly as much as I have the Baudelaires, I can say with reasonable accuracy that they were smiling for the same reason.

~ Lemony Snicket

And every book, you find, has its own social group--friends of its own it wants to introduce you to, like a party in the library that need never, ever end.

~ Caitlin Moran

You don’t write a book when God called you to publish a library! You don’t plant a tree when God send you to cultivate a forest! You don’t evangelize to a crowd when God called you for a multitude! No matter the circumstances, find yourself doing something relevant and do it till all is well done!

~ Israelmore Ayivor

A country whose citizens do not read is already late because reading is just the first step to wisdom acquisition. Application of the learnt knowledge is the gateway to personal transformation. If you don't read, you have not yet begun anything!

~ Israelmore Ayivor

My wish is to create a huge library of books.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

It may be that I link every library to that first one - to my early childhood experience of drawing on the floor near my father's desk. A library is of course a real place, but it is also an unreal one. What happens there is mostly silent. I think I've always liked the whispering aspect of libraries, the hushing librarians and my feeling of solitude among many.

~ Siri Hustvedt

We are the only species on the planet, so far as we know, to have invented a communal memory stored neither in our genes nor in our brains. The warehouse of this memory is called the library

~ Carl Sagan

I love the sound of people thinking.

~ Will Bly

…in the library…surrounded by things far more dangerous than what roamed the school corridors. For here thoughts were housed.

~ Louise Penny

I always come here when I can't sleep [. . .] every night.

~ Faith Erin Hicks

My two favourite things in life are libraries and bicycles. They both move people forward without wasting anything. The perfect day: riding a bike to the library.

~ Peter Golkin

One alphabet at a time, you can write an encyclopaedia. One word at a time, you can publish an entire library.

~ Israelmore Ayivor

I really admire people who don’t need to live surrounded by lots of stuff. My bedroom is piled up with clothes and books, papers and photographs. I like to collect things, anything I can grab from wherever I’m travelling. I think it’s the sign of slight anxiety to always want something around you to represent a good moment you had, to hang on to the leftovers. But then they’re a pleasure to look at too, so it’s not all negative.

~ Isabelle Huppert

That's what I like so much about libraries, they smell the way we would like to imagine the past.

~ Ruth Reichl

Oh please tell me we're not doing the Poirot thing again — the suspects in the library with the candlestick or whatever'.Max looked at him [DCI Cotton]. 'Fruitcake in this case. And what would you prefer? A car chase? It’s the most efficient way to flush out a killer, as Dame Agatha Christie well knew.

~ G.m. Malliet

Deserted libraries hold the shades of writers who worked within, and are haunted by their absence.

~ Alberto Manguel

Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method.— Walter Benjamin, Unpacking My Library

~ Phillip Lopate

If you're frightened of the countless number of books in the library, you'll never write anything, until you close your eyes and hold the pen.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

It’s remarkable that a device, which fits in your pocket, can hold thousands of books. But a room full of books is an entirely different kind of remarkable.

~ Brandt Legg