Top 100 Books And Library Quotes
#1. I was teased if I brought my books home. I would take a paper bag to the library and put the books in the bag and bring them home. Not that I was that concerned about them teasing me - because I would hit them in a heartbeat. But I felt a little ashamed, having books.
Walter Dean Myers
#2. With such a vast and wonderful library spread out before us, we often skim books or read just the reviews. We might already have encountered the Greatest Idea, the insight that would have transformed us had we savored it, taken it to heart, and worked it into our lives.
Jonathan Haidt
#3. I'd like to be born the son of a duke with 90,000 pounds a year, on an enormous estate ... And I'd like to have the most enormous library, and I'd like to think that I could read those books forever and forever, and die unlamented, unknown, unsung, unhonored - and packed with information.
Richard Francis Burton
#4. Well I just so happened to bump into a chess book in the library at school and I didn't know that there were books on chess and so I take this book out and I'm like this is going to be cool, I'm going to whoop on this guy now, so I studied the book and I go back and the guy crushes me again.
Maurice Ashley
#5. There were a lot of things I loved about working in a library, but mostly I miss the library patrons. I love books, but books are everywhere. Library patrons are as various and oddball and democratic as library books.
Elizabeth McCracken
#6. The public library is where place and possibility meet.
Stuart Dybek
#7. I stood in the library admiring the huge book collection. There was something inherently calming about being surrounded by books, even their smell and texture was comforting.
Saffron Mello Castro
#8. Standing there, staring at the long shelves crammed with books, I felt myself relax and was suddenly at peace.
Helene Hanff
#9. In the dark, with the windows lit and the rows of books glittering, the library is a closed space, a universe of self-serving rules that pretend to replace or translate those of the shapeless universe beyond.
Alberto Manguel
#10. All I wanted to do was go back inside to the library and read a book.I used to spend all my time reading books, or watching television. It was safe. Nobody ever was hurt or teased or looked stupid while reading books or watching television.
Kathryn Magendie
#11. I despair of ever getting it through anybody's head I am not interested in bookshops, I am interested in what's written in the books. I don't browse in bookshops, I browse in libraries, where you can take a book home and read it, and if you like it you go to a bookshop and buy it.
Helene Hanff
#12. Heaven would be a comfortable chair, a library, Diet Coke, and an occasional cheese pizza. Sex once in a while. No talking. ~ Drew Stirling
Jayden Hunter
#13. In a library we are surrounded by many hundreds of dear friends imprisoned by an enchanter in paper and leathern boxes.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#14. It looked like the sort of book described in library catalogues as 'slightly foxed', although it would be more honest to admit that it looked as though it had been badgered, wolved and possibly beared as well.
Terry Pratchett
#15. I suspect that the real attraction was a large library of fine books, which was left to dust and spiders since Uncle March died.
Louisa May Alcott
#16. I have three libraries. As a gift, a friend alphabetized and organized my main library of novels, history books, and nonfiction. Then I have a photo-book collection. Then there's this nearly whole room of my childhood books. I've also got cookbooks and a big collection of horse-related books.
Sally Mann
#17. We'll always need printed books that don't mutate the way digital books do; we'll always need places to display books, auditoriums for book talks, circles for story time; we'll always need brick-and-mortar libraries.
Marilyn Johnson
#18. Had J.D. Salinger known who John Hinckley and mark David Chapman were before they bought his books or took them out of the library? Would it have mattered if he had? Had he returned the royalties he received from those purchases?
Adam Langer
#19. The library was like a stone quarry where no rain had fallen in ten thousand years. Way off in that direction: silence. Way off in that direction: hush. It was the time between things finished and things begun. Nobody died here. Nobody was born. The library, and all its books, just were. We
Ray Bradbury
#20. If you want to be a writer, you should go into the largest library you can find and stand there contemplating the books that have been written. Then you should ask yourself, 'Do I really have anything to add?' If you have the arrogance or the humility to say yes, you will know you have the vocation.
Margaret Atwood
#21. I love the Web, but the basis of my work is going through the physical books. When you go to the library, you see other books around on the shelves that you never knew existed. You can flip through a book and see the whole outline of it.
Camille Paglia
#22. A few days earlier, Adriana and I had been browsing books at the local library. I happened to turn around and look at her ... and that was it. The man who "loved to laugh" in Mary Poppins had nothing on us.
Gina Marinello-Sweeney
#23. Books on prayer are good, but not good enough. As books on cooking are good but hopeless unless there is food to work on, so with prayer. One can read a library of prayer books and not be one whit more powerful in prayer. We must learn to pray, and we must pray to learn to pray.
Leonard Ravenhill
#24. As a child, I loved to read books. The library was a window to the world, a pathway to worlds and people far from my neighborhood in Philadelphia.
Ed Bradley
#25. Joss's ears perked up. He loved libraries. Nowhere else in the world felt so safe and homey. Nowhere else smelled like books and dust and happy solitude quite like a library did.
Heather Brewer
#26. Ereaders were a great convenience, but nothing could beat the smell of a library and old books.
Kate Evangelista
#27. I am the girl who spends hours huddled in a corner of a library, trying to find what you love the most about Marlowe, just so I can write you a poem worthy of Shakespeare. I've made books my lovers, hours my enemies and you the only story.
Nikita Gill
#28. As a child, I wanted only two things - to be left alone to read my library books, and to get away from my provincial hometown and go to London to be a writer. And I always knew that when I got there, I wanted to make loads of money.
Julie Burchill
#29. Library? That sounded reasonable. As my thoughts revolved around my days surrounded by books, something miraculous happened. My anger subsided. It ebbed away as the thoughts of books, pages, and comfort entered my head.
Rebecca Maizel
#30. The very idea of a library for me is bound to my mother and father and includes the history of my own metamorphosis through books, fictions that are no less part of me than much of my own history.
Siri Hustvedt
#31. The atmosphere of the place soothed her automatically; the rich lantern lights, the sheer scent of paper and leather, and the fact that everywhere she looked, there were books, books, beautiful books.
Genevieve Cogman
#32. I was a bookworm. Every week I'd go to the library and get seven books. Remember libraries? I wonder if people still go. And I learned about everything from the library. I came from a Scottish family. Old school.
Colin Mochrie
#33. A few books well chosen, and well made use of will be more profitable than a great confused Alexandrian library.
Thomas Fuller
#34. All my books take a long time to research. I spend several months researching before I start writing, and in the middle of writing I often have to stop and look up stuff. At my local library, I am one of the best customers! The research takes several months.
Linda Sue Park
#35. On January 15, I was traveling with four library books, including a copy of Just Culture, a book about safety issues. I later called my local library to apologize for leaving the books on the plane, and they agreed not to charge me for replacing them.
Chesley B. Sullenberger, III
#36. There's this magical place,' he says with mock solemnity, 'called a library--I don't know if you've heard of it, but they have books, and also newspaper, and back issues of newspapers...
Moira Fowley-Doyle
#37. The books in the library were old, rotted, and there was no one left in the world to read them, but Kira made sure that none of them went into the fire. It seemed wrong.
Dan Wells
#38. Part of my job is to help other kids find books, because not everyone has a keenly organized mind. Some kids could wander the library for hours and still have no idea how to find anything. For them, the Dewey Decimal System might as well be advanced calculus.
Neal Shusterman
#39. Resa longed for the kitchen, always full of the humming of the oversize fridge, for mo's workshop in the garden, and the armchair in the library where you could sit and visit strange worlds without getting lost in them
Cornelia Funke
#40. I was an early reader, reading even before kindergarten, and since we did not have books in my home, my older brother, Alexander, was responsible for our trip every week to the public library to exchange books already read for new ones to be read.
Rosalyn Sussman Yalow
#41. There are other books in a man's library besides Ovid, and after dawdling ever so long at a woman's knee, one day he gets up and is free. We have all been there; we have all had the fever
the strongest and the smallest, from Samson, Hercules, Rinaldo, downward: but it burns out, and you get well.
William Makepeace Thackeray
#42. Come with me,' Mom says.
To the library.
Books and summertime
go together.
Lisa Schroeder
#43. Sometimes I'm asked if I do research for my stories. The answer is yes and no. No, in the sense that I seldom plow through books at the library to gather material. Yes, in the sense that the first fifteen years of my life turned out to be one big research project.
Jerry Spinelli
#44. A library is never -- for lovers of the written word -- simply a place for conserving or storing books but rather a sort of living creature with a personality and even moods which we should understand and learn to live with.
Francisco Marquez Villanueva
#45. The most inspiring objects are books. I have about 5,000 volumes in my home library. It's an unending source of visuals and ideas.
Maira Kalman
#46. I wanted shelves for my books, and a finer chair for this desk. Of course there should be another library. What was a house to me if it did not possess a library?
Anne Rice
#47. It was easy to get a job at the Cedar Bar because people came and went, but I didn't like the atmosphere. Instead, I got a job at Cooper Union Library. I stayed at Cooper Union for seven years; it was my salvation. While I worked there, I also read books of every kind.
Claes Oldenburg
#48. There is a somewhat time-worn joke about people taking up library work because they like to read : the joke consisting of the fact that librarians have so little time to read. But, I tell you, those who do not, and there are some, are in the wrong profession.
Mary Virginia Provines
#49. In my fool hardy youth, when my friends were dreaming of heroic deeds in the realms of engineering and law, finance and national politics, I dreamt of becoming a librarian.
Alberto Manguel
#50. I do a lot of research for my books. I can't possibly know all the things I write about and I love learning new things. I spend hours and hours doing research in books, libraries and online. [Once] I traveled to the reservation to get the settings and the flavor of the place down right.
Linda Conrad
#52. An ordinary man can surround himself with two thousand books and thenceforward have at least one place in the world in which it is always possible to be happy.
Augustine Birrell
#53. My interior is very, very dense - Proustian-looking, sort of Henry James. The walls are covered in pictures, and I transformed the big drawing room into a library lined with books.
Hamish Bowles
#54. Something about the beauty of the library and how many books there were made me feel really eager to read, and I couldn't wait to get some free time so I could go back there and explore.
Francine Prose
#55. I was always furious because you couldn't take out more than three books in one day. You would go home with your three books and read them and it would still be only five o'clock. The library didn't shut till half past, but you couldn't change the books till the next day.
Fay Weldon
#56. The venerable dead are waiting in my library to entertain me and relieve me from the nonsense of surviving mortals.
Samuel Davies
#57. I'm a library user and I just don't hoard books. To me, they're for sharing.
Sara Sheridan
#58. 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
#59. Don't join the book burners. Don't think you're going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book ...
Dwight D. Eisenhower
#60. Doctor Who: You want weapons? We're in a library. Books are the best weapon in the world. This room's the greatest arsenal we could have. Arm yourself!
(from Tooth and Claw in Season 2)
Russell T. Davies
#61. the best of Cervantes is untranslatable, and this undeniable fact is in itself an incentive [for one and all] to learn Spanish.
Aubrey F.G. Bell
#62. One of the first things my father taught me was that the library was made for and available to me. It's a place where you not only learn from books but you learn responsibility - how to borrow, take care of, and give back.
Marcus Samuelsson
#63. Hey! I get to sleep in a library and read books all night! Without pity, where would I be? I'm a total pity s-s-ssslut.
Joe Hill
#64. You hold me very tight in under my clothes, and if there's a library anywhere near then someone just removed its roof, the shelves just flooded with the sun and all the old books just remembered what it means to be bound in skin and to have a spine.
Ali Smith
#65. When you juice books from a library you are taking the history and imagination that has accumulated over so many years there.
S.A. Tawks
#66. Montrose decided then and there that a full library, one made of old-fashioned paper books with bindings, the kind that cannot be electronically re-edited by anonymous lines of hidden code, was just as much a necessity for a free man as a shooting iron or a printing press.
John C. Wright
#67. Alone in the worn mahogany paneled library surrounded by hundreds of books that filled every shelf and lined every wall from floor to ceiling, Lady Butler contemplated, How odd it is that a room filled with millions of words can be so silent.
Lance Taubold
#68. He began reading her eyes more deeply and passionately than the books in the library.
Avijeet Das
#69. Immigrants use the library often. A lot of them don't have access to books and Internet at home. They seem so disconnected to the city.
Rabindranath Maharaj
#70. It's a natural consequence of the capacity of a bookstore or library to contain entire worlds, whole universes, and all contained between the covers of books. In that sense, every library or bookstore is practically infinite.
John Connolly
#71. In my library/study/barn, there is a Ping-Pong table on which I can pile working books and spread maps.
Antony Beevor
#72. Every library answers a twofold need, which is often also a twofold obsession: that of conserving certain objects (books) and that of organizing them in certain ways
Georges Perec
#73. Seeing one's books on the shelf tells you so much about the way somebody has, over the years, put together their private library, which is a reflection of their minds and their selves.
Jeanette Winterson
#74. Damn, I know. I remember your mountains of books. I want to build you a library." Jack lowered his mouth and kissed me.
I swallowed as emotion clogged my throat. He might as well have asked me to marry him.
Natasha Boyd
#75. He was no longer quite sure whether anything he had ever thought or felt was truly his own property, or whether his thoughts were merely a common part of the world's store of ideas which had always existed ready-made and which people only borrowed, like books from a library.
Milan Kundera
#76. Maybe Heaven will be a library and then I might get to finish my 'to-read' list.
Kellie Elmore
#77. Still, even without the country or a lake, the summer was a fine thing, particularly when you were at the beginning of it, looking ahead into it. There would be months of beautifully long, empty days, and each other to play with, and the books from the library.
Edward Eager
#78. One of the many reasons I love libraries. Everyone is lost and not wanting to be found in a library.
Sarah Noffke
#79. He pointed the scepter around the library and had an instant input of all of the books that were there into his brain, as if he had read them all at once.
Kaza Kingsley
#80. You've got to love libraries. You've got to love books. You've got to love poetry. You've got to love everything about literature. Then, you can pick the one thing you love most and write about it.
Ray Bradbury
#81. It is the interest one takes in books that makes a library. And if a library have interest it is; if not, it isn't.
Carolyn Wells
#82. I have been blessed with friends who do things rather than buy things: friends who will change books at the library, take a bag of your old clothes to a thrift store, bring you cuttings and plant them in a window box, fill the bird feeder in your garden when you can't get out.
Maeve Binchy
#83. Be a little careful about your library. Do you foresee what you will do with it? Very little to be sure. But the real question is what it will do with you? You will come here and get books that will open your eyes, and your ears, and your curiosity, and turn you inside out or outside in.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#84. He was intrigued by the power of words, not the literary words that filled the books in the library but the sharp, staccato words that went into the writing of news stories. Words that went for the jugular. Active verbs that danced and raced on the page.
Robert Cormier
#85. Ramona grabbed the book. "It's mine. I told you it was mine!" Then she turned to Beezus and said triumphantly, "You said people didn't buy books at the library and now you just bought one!
Beverly Cleary
#86. I was pretty sure the only two rooms I needed in my house were a kitchen with a huge table and a library full of books. "It'll
April White
#87. The dusty library air is electric with secrets/ almost palpable in the thick quiet that bounces between/ Cal and those books and me
Stasia Ward Kehoe
#88. I saw a post the other day, where someone wrote that, when they walk through a library, they touch the spines of all the books they've read , as a way of greeting their favorite characters . . .
Try that with one of my novels, and you'll walk away counting your fingers!
Max Hawthorne
#89. The last time I glanced at the library books on the kitchen shelf they were more than five months overdue, and I wondered whether I would have chosen differently if I had known that these were the last books, the ones which would stand forever on our kitchen shelf.
Shirley Jackson
#90. I remember going to a monastery library when I was very young and being surrounded by ancient books. I fell in love.
Hans Ulrich Obrist
#91. I was a member of Corstorphine Library in Edinburgh, and every Friday night, my parents took me there to borrow books. I also used to spend nearly all my pocket money on books.
Philip Kerr
#92. He liked bookstores, and libraries too. They had a sacred, peaceful hush, like graveyards without the shadow of death.
Garrett Leigh
#93. And what he didn't understand is that she was a library full of adventures in every corner and compartment.
Rand
#94. The apartment was tiny, but neat: the bed was made; a few books (business books and a self-help book, all in English and all from the library) were stacked on a nightstand.
Patrick Hoffman
#95. For some 25 years, I worked as a librarian, first at the New York Public Library, then at Trenton State College in New Jersey. My life has always been with, around, and for books.
Avi
#96. When I was little, I wanted to be a doctor. I was really interested in gore. My grandfather was an orthopedic surgeon and he had a lot of books in his library that I would just pore over. A lot of them had really horrible pictures of deformities.
Jennifer Egan
#97. My mother always kept library books in the house, and one rainy Sunday afternoon - this was before television, and we didn't even have a radio - I picked up a book to look at the pictures and discovered I was reading and enjoying what I read.
Beverly Cleary
#98. A house on the park. He'd seen it a million times. And now was in it. It smelled of man sweat and spaghetti sauce and old books. Like a library where sweaty men went to cook spaghetti.
George Saunders
#99. If books were girls and reading was s-ss-ssss-fucking, this would be the biggest whorehouse in the county and I'd be the most ruthless pimp you ever met. Whap the girls on the butts and send them off to their tricks as fast and often as I can.
Joe Hill
#100. She thought of the library, so shining white and new; the rows and rows of unread books; the bliss of unhurried sojourns there and of going out to a restaurant, alone, to eat.
Maud Hart Lovelace