Top 100 Books Libraries Quotes
#1. All our institutions rest upon business. Without it we should not have schools, colleges, churches, parks, playgrounds, pavements, books, libraries, art, music, or anything else that we value.
Charles Gates Jr.
#2. 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
#3. The purpose of a lecture should not be to impart information. There are books, libraries, nowadays the internet, for that. A lecture should inspire and provoke thought.
Richard Dawkins
#4. The acquisition of a book signalled not just the potential acquisition of knowledge but also something like the property rights to a piece of ground: the knowledge became a visitable place.
James Wood
#5. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads.
Ray Bradbury
#6. Books are a world in themselves, it is true; but they are not the only world. The world itself is a volume larger than all the libraries in it.
William Hazlitt
#7. Libraries have certainly come a long way. The days of card pockets inside the backsleeves of books seemed like a faded dream. As a kid, I used to love all those withdrawal date stamps.
Haruki Murakami
#8. One, I have a wonderful publisher, Black Sparrow Press; as long as they exist, they will keep me in print. And they claim they sell very respectable numbers of my books, so I guess, and it's true, every place I go, my books are in libraries and on bookshelves.
Diane Wakoski
#10. You don't spend your life hanging around books without learning a thing or two.
Lemony Snicket
#11. 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
#12. To live among such excellent helps as our libraries afford, to have so many silent wise companions whenever we please.
Richard Baxter
#13. There were two sets of double doors leading out of the antechamber, one marked STACKS and the other TOMES. Not knowing the difference between the two, I headed to the ones labeled STACKS. That was what I wanted. Stacks of books. Great heaps of books. Shelf after endless shelf of books.
Patrick Rothfuss
#14. In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.
Mark Twain
#15. There wasn't a place I could think of that was more magical than a building bursting with books and stories and words ...
Lindsay Eland
#16. But to her, libraries were like hotels: secret villages inhabited by passing strangers from a thousand different worlds brought together just for a few hours.
Simon Sebag Montefiore
#17. He liked bookstores, and libraries too. They had a sacred, peaceful hush, like graveyards without the shadow of death.
Garrett Leigh
#18. Choosing a new book was like looking for treasure.
Kit Pearson
#19. We should do our best to satisfy your interests in stories and books and the world. There are libraries.
Neil Gaiman
#20. Books are becoming everything to me. If I had at this moment any choice in life, I would bury myself in one of those immense libraries ... and never pass a waking hour without a book before me.
Thomas Babington Macaulay
#21. Armies aren't very good about carrying libraries with them. I can't imagine why. We'd fight so much less if everyone would juste sit down and read
Cynthia Hand
#22. It's night in the Free People's World Tree Library. All the librarians are asleep, ... between the pages of their enchanted novels.
Kelly Link
#23. Libraries are where we learn that we can live our lives through books.
Kevin Barry
#24. Don't you think it's funny that the presidents are still expected to build libraries when hardly anyone reads books? I read a study that said less than ten percent of adults read a book in the past year.
Dustin Lawson
#25. Now, public libraries are most admirable institutions, but they have one irritating custom. They want their books back.
Cecil B. DeMille
#26. Fields are places in books, and books are placed in libraries.
Morrissey
#27. 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
#28. I didn't like seeing books damaged. I'd seen enough burned-out schoolhouses and libraries in my first life.
Andrew Smith
#29. One of the many reasons I love libraries. Everyone is lost and not wanting to be found in a library.
Sarah Noffke
#30. You take the books, you lie there in the pools of light and you drink life. That is how intensely I have loved libraries.
Ray Bradbury
#31. 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
#32. Books and bottles breed generosity, and the bibliophile and the oenophile og through life scattering largesse from their libraries and cellars
Holless Wilbur Allen
#33. If your library is not "unsafe," it probably isn't doing its job.
John Berry
#34. Ultimately, the number of books always exceeds the space they are granted.
Alberto Manguel
#35. What is more important to a library than anything else
than everything else
is the fact that it exists.
[The Premise Of Meaning, American Scholar; Washington, DC, June 5, 1972]
Archibald MacLeish
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. Libraries
Are
Neccessary
Gardens,
Unsurpassed
At
Growing
Excitement
J. Patrick Lewis
#39. The library became the cathedral where I would come to worship amd the stories were as precious to me as prayers.
Anita Anand
#40. Don't mark up the Library's copy, you fool! Librarians are Unprankable. They'll track you down! They have skills!
Charles Ogden
#41. They could take the money from building enough nukes to kill all the Russians in the world and give it to libraries. What good does an independent nuclear deterrent do Britain, compared to the good of libraries?
Jo Walton
#42. 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
#43. Millions of pages cloaked in dust and inspiration and wisdom.
Sarah Noffke
#44. 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
#45. The reflections and histories of men and women throughout the world are contained in books ... America's greatness is not only recorded in books, but it is also dependent upon each and every citizen being able to utilize public libraries.
Terence Cooke
#46. Well, I've spent a lot of time in your libraries at night," said Ripred.
"You come up and read books?" asked Gregor.
"Read them, eat them, whatever mood strikes me," he said.
Suzanne Collins
#47. You know, you don't expect everyone to be as educated as everyone else or have the same achievements, but you expect at least to be offered at least some of the opportunities, and libraries are the most simple and the most open way to give people access to books.
Zadie Smith
#48. The founding of libraries was like constructing more public granaries, amassing reserves against a spiritual winter which by certain signs, in spite of myself, I see ahead ...
Marguerite Yourcenar
#49. I loved to read, still do, and it seemed that the writing was a result of the love of books and reading and libraries.
Adriana Trigiani
#50. It would be hard for me to overestimate the importance of reading. Nothing can expand the mind and heart like the magic al world of books. ... Our libraries are an essential resource for our children, our communities, and our future.
Danielle Steel
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. Rule number one: Don't fuck with librarians.
Neil Gaiman
#54. The library was the best place in the world.
Anita Anand
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. I like shelves full of books in a library, but if all books become electronic, the task of big research libraries remains the same - keep what's published in the form in which it appeared.
Nicholson Baker
#58. 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
#59. My grandma always said that God made libraries so that people didn't have any excuse to be stupid.
Joan Bauer
#60. 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
#61. For six months, then, Emma, at fifteen years of age, made her hands dirty with books from old lending libraries.
Gustave Flaubert
#62. Early in my publishing career, someone told me I'd need to have five books in print before I could quit my job as a journalist. Turns out it was closer to 10 books. It also turns out that while it's great to see my titles on bookstore shelves, my best customers are schools and libraries.
Kate Klise
#63. I love libraries. I love books. There is something sacred, I think, about a great library because it represents the preservation of the wisdom, the learning, the pondering, of men and women of all the ages accumulated together under one roof to which we can have access as our needs require.
Gordon B. Hinckley
#64. Those who governed these primitive monasteries soon realised the fact that without books their inmates would relapse into barbarism, and libraries were got together.
John Willis Clark
#65. She liked books, but the hours spent in small-town libraries were tedious, and she began the first list when she was eight or nine as a means of distraction. A list of names, eventually expanding to ten or twelve pages: Lilia, Gabriel, Anna, Michelle. In every town her name was different.
Emily St. John Mandel
#66. We all love to hear a good story. We save our stories in books. We save our books in libraries. Libraries are the storyhouses full of all those stories and secrets.
Kathy Bates
#67. In evil times, when public virtue has left the earth, ancient writings are of little account, and no one cares to disturb the silence of the libraries.
Joseph-Arthur De Gobineau
#68. Libraries will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no libraries.
Anne Herbert
#69. Libraries are a consistent and major source of books for free reading.
Stephen D. Krashen
#70. Betsy returned to her chair, took off her coat and hat, opened her book and forgot the world again.
Maud Hart Lovelace
#72. Great books are written for Christianity much oftener than great deeds are done for it. City libraries tell us of the reign of Jesus Christ but city streets tell us of the reign of Satan.
Horace Mann
#73. When I was a student I spent a lot of time in the library. That's where the books and smart girls were.
Mike Bove
#74. Knowing I lov'd my books, he furnish'd me From mine own library with volumes that I prize above my dukedom.
William Shakespeare
#75. 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
#76. There is a sad disconnectedness that overcomes a library when its owner is gone.
Lois McMaster Bujold
#77. Libraries are about books. Books have no color. And they don't care who reads them.
Augusta Scattergood
#78. All the books we own, both read and unread, are the fullest expression of self we have at our disposal ... But with each passing year, and with each whimsical purchase, our libraries become more and more able to articulate who we are, whether we read the books or not.
Nick Hornby
#79. The three rules of the Librarians of Time and Space are: 1) Silence; 2) Books must be returned no later than the last date shown; and 3) Do not interfere with the nature of causality.
Terry Pratchett
#80. When my father first took me to Ennis Library I went down among the shelves and felt company, not only the company of writers, but the readers too, because they had lifted and opened and read these books. The books were worn in a way they can only get worn by hands and eyes and minds
Niall Williams
#81. The BBC's aim, along with schools, libraries and literacy groups, to involve more people in reading groups is an exciting idea and one that I hope will keep readers all over the UK exploring and sharing the wonderful world of books.
Tessa Jowell
#82. Reading is important.
Books are important.
Librarians are important. (Also, libraries are not child-care facilities, but sometimes feral children raise themselves among the stacks.)
Neil Gaiman
#83. Libraries should be open to all - except the censor.
[Response to questionnaire in Saturday Review, October 29 1960]
John F. Kennedy
#84. To know your way round a library is to master the whole of culture, i.e. the whole world.
Sophie Divry
#85. The great library that Google is rushing to create shouldn't be confused with the libraries we've known up until now. It's not a library of books. It's a library of snippets.
Nicholas Carr
#86. There are many ways of discarding [books]. You can give them to friends,
or enemies,
or to associations or to poor Southern libraries. But the surest way is to lend them. Then they never come back to bother you.
Carolyn Wells
#87. They should be taking bonuses from bankers, not library books from schoolchildren. What kind of society are we building?
Sara Sheridan
#88. When I was his age, and even today, when it comes to books and libraries, too much is never enough
Josh Hanagarne
#89. I love vast libraries; yet there is a doubt,
If one be better with them or without,
Unless he use them wisely, and, indeed,
Knows the high art of what and how to read.
John Godfrey Saxe
#90. that I have read many books, but to little purpose, for want of good method; I have confusedly tumbled over divers authors in our libraries, with small profit, for want of art, order, memory, judgment.
Robert Burton
#91. In America there is a public library in every community. How many public libraries are there in Africa? Every day there are new books coming out and new ideas being discussed. But these new books and ideas don't reach Africa and we are being left behind.
George Weah
#92. You are a total stranger and you want to take my library book.
Elizabeth Kostova
#93. Television and film are our libraries now. Our history books.
David Strathairn
#94. When I discovered libraries, it was like having Christmas every day.
Jean Fritz
#95. Digital books and other texts are increasingly coming under the control of distributors and other gatekeepers rather than readers and libraries.
Jonathan Zittrain
#96. He helped the Librarian up. There was a red glow in the ape's eyes. It had tried to steal his books. This was probably the best proof any wizard could require that the trolleys were brainless.
Terry Pratchett
#97. Many useful and valuable books lie buried in shops and libraries, unknown and unexamined, unless some lucky compiler opens them by chance, and finds an easy spoil of wit and learning.
Samuel Johnson
#98. What do we, as a nation, care about books? How much do you think we spend altogether on our libraries, public or private, as compared with what we spend on our horses?
John Ruskin
#99. But the vast majority of books ever written are not accessible to anyone except the most tenacious researchers at premier academic libraries. Books written after 1923 quickly disappear into a literary black hole.
Sergey Brin
#100. Libraries, whether my own or shared with a greater reading public, have always seemed to me pleasantly mad places, and for as long as I can remember I've been seduced by their labyrinthine logic, which suggests that reason (if not art) rules over a cacophonous arrangement of books.
Alberto Manguel
