Personal Library Quotes

#1. Umberto Eco is the owner of a large personal library of almost 30,000 books that he has not read. [To him] read books are far less valuable than unread ones.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#2. Getting rid of most of my personal library comported nicely with my longheld fantasy of traveling light, existing with minimal encumbrances, living simply. A fantasy it has always been, for the longr I have lived, the heavier has my equipage grown.

Joseph Epstein

#3. A personal library is a reflection of who you are and who you want to be, of what you value and what you desire, of how much you know and how much more you'd like to know.

Michael Dirda

#4. If you look at my personal library, you will notice that it ranges from Henry James to Steig Larsson, from Margaret Atwood to Max Hastings. There's Jane Austen and Tom Perrotta and volumes of letters from Civil War privates. It's pretty eclectic.

Chris Bohjalian

#5. There's a way of doing it!" Hermione said crossly. "There just has to be!" She seemed to be taking the library's lack of useful information on the subject as a personal insult; it had never failed her before.

J.K. Rowling

#6. History shows that an examination of the personal collection of titles in any man's library will provide something of a glimpse into his soul.

Andrew Smith

#7. No story that juicy was going to stay secret for long.

Jim Butcher

#8. If I had to go to war again, I'd bring lacrosse players.

Conn Smythe

#9. Sophia, with real nobility of character, then asked Papa to explain something she had read in Sir John Malcolm's History of Persia, which the Vicar, whose only personal extravagance was his purchase of books, had lately added to his library.

Georgette Heyer

#10. Open the book and read it to renew your mind.

Lailah Gifty Akita

#11. Music strikes the ear as a perfectly undisturbed uniform sound which remains unaltered as long as it exists.

Hermann Von Helmholtz

#12. Texting is very loose in its structure. No one thinks about capital letters or punctuation when one texts, but then again, do you think about those things when you talk?

John McWhorter

#13. Everything begins in the mind. If you want to see clearly, you need clear vision.

Swami Satchidananda

#14. Your courage is there right alongside of your fear.

Sanna Anderson

#15. I have no personal agenda in whether or not a library keeps 'Whale Talk' or 'Athletic Shorts' or any of my books shelved.

Chris Crutcher

#16. One by one, the villager torches are lit, and a fire spreads through their circle until it blazes like an enormous bullion ring.

Joanna Wiebe

#17. The novelist Umberto Eco famously kept what the writer Nassim Taleb called an "anti-library," a vast collection of books he had not read, believing that one's personal trove should contain as much of what you don't know as possible. Some

Pamela Paul

#18. As music migrates into our iPods, CD collections require less and less room, residing in our heads rather than resounding off the walls. The protracted labor of amassing a personal music library has lost its detective zeal.

James Wolcott

#19. There are three things to leave behind; your photographs, your library, and your personal journals. These things are certainly going to be more valuable to future generations than your furniture!

Jim Rohn

#20. Ceaselessly, evil battles with good, right clashes with wrong, darkness comes against the light, and the counterfeit struggles to supplant the real.

Bob Larson

#21. Here you had the top professional soldier in Japan, and to think he didn't know how to kill himself with a gun! They took him straight to the hospital, he got the best care the American medical team could give him, recovered, then was tried and hanged. It's a terrible way to die.

Haruki Murakami

#22. The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.
(About Books; Recoiling, Rereading, Retelling, New York Times, February 22, 1987)

Anatole Broyard

#23. How I feel is that if I wanted anything I'd take it. That's what I've always thought all my life. But it happens that I want you, and so I just haven't room for any other desires.

F Scott Fitzgerald

#24. On a very personal level, I have fond memories of spending a lot of time in the Library of Congress working on my collection of poems 'Native Guard.' I was there over a summer doing research in the archives and then writing in the reading room at the Jefferson building.

Natasha Trethewey

#25. The powerful don't make revolutions

Marge Piercy

#26. Sitting in the brightly lit library, surrounded by books, in total silence, that was ma personal zenith.

Irvine Welsh

#27. Drake is my own personal suicide, and the sooner I except that, the sooner I can come to terms with my loner status at the school library

Addison Moore

#28. Perhaps our matching black outfits - even Phoebe wears dark colors - convince him that we are lesbian Buddhists

Helen Smith

#29. Read a short story every day. By the end of the week you would have read volumes of stories.

Lailah Gifty Akita