When you are growing up there are two institutional places that affect you most powerfully: the church, which belongs to God, and the public library, which belongs to you. The public library is a great equaliser.

~ Keith Richards

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In the meantime, there is not an hour to lose. I am about to visit the public library.

~ Jules Verne

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Democracy or reading, democracy of space: our public library tradition, wherever we live in the wide world, was incredibly hard-won for us by the generations before us and ought to be protected, not just for ourselves but in the name of every generation after us.

~ Ali Smith

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I exercised my mental muscles in the library, and lo and behold, I transformed myself from a casual reader into a focused one. So it was more than just free books, but also free space and a culture that reinforced settling down, deep reading, thinking, imagining, and exploring with my mind. I am no doubt a writer today because I had a place to go as a kid, where I knew stories were essential, and where everybody also reveled in the wonder within books.

~ Sergio Troncoso

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We have all sorts of conditions of booksellers: one is fanatic on the subject of libraries. He thinks that every public library should be dynamited. Another thinks that moving pictures will destroy the book trade. What rot! Surely everything that arouses people's minds, that makes them alert and questing, increases their appetite for books. - Roger Mifflin

~ Christopher Morley

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