Top 100 Quotes About Libraries
#1. There's so much proscription in the lives of young people, and it's so vital to have a place that says, look, here are the doors onto the world and amazingly, you're free to choose any one you like. - Patrick Ness on Libraries
Patrick Ness
#2. Before Gutenberg, libraries were small
the Cambridge University library had only 122 volumes in 1424, for instance; after Gutenberg literacy became widespread.
Larry Stone
#3. In every great city, with all its gleaming walls and massive libraries, with all the shimmering fountains and sculptured gardens, there is a superfluity of dung that must be carted out.
Jeff Wheeler
#5. I've always liked libraries. They're quiet and full of books and full of knowledge.
Haruki Murakami
#6. Whole libraries can be filled with the papers written about cancer and its causes, but the contents of these papers fit on one little library visiting card.
August Bier
#7. Being a writer usually entails a fairly quiet life. However much travel one might do, however many tours and appearances, the job entails solitude: long hours in libraries, long hours at a desk.
Jill Paton Walsh
#8. We walked for a long time. We kissed, we embraced on the Lungarno, I asked him, half serious, half joking, if he wanted to sneak into my room. He shook his head, he went back to kissing me passionately. There were entire libraries separating him and Antonio, but they were similar.
Elena Ferrante
#9. Browsing for books with a mouse and screen is not nearly as joyful an act as wandering the stacks and getting lost in the labyrinthine corridors of knowledge. The best libraries are places of imagination, education and community. The best libraries have mystery to them.
Sam Weller
#10. Books had become a symbol of trust and libraries places of peace and stability. In all the chaos of the world that counted people as different levels of worthy, the Library served all equally. All genders, races, levels of ability. It was the one place they could all be safe, p195
Rachel Caine
#11. If you want to feel the life and the body of great men who are long gone, go to their tombs or monuments; if you want to understand the real life and the wisdom of great men who are long gone, go to their libraries!
Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
#12. If written directions alone would suffice, libraries wouldn't need to have the rest of the universities attached.
Judith Martin
#13. Who's to say what a 'literary life' is? As long as you are writing often, and writing well, you don't need to be hanging-out in libraries all the time.
Nightclubs are great literary research centers. So is Ibiza!
Roman Payne
#14. Shut not your doors to me proud libraries.
Walt Whitman
#15. Libraries) Getting the Word Out: Academic Libraries and Scholarly Publishing, edited by Maria Bonn and Mike Furlough. As Courant and Jones
Alice Crawford
#16. Libraries and demons," she muttered. "What is the attraction?
Jana Oliver
#17. When thinking harshly on the human condition, as I so often do, my antidote is to think gently on libraries, for if human beings are capable of preserving the history of our knowledge in the form of books, there there may still be hope.
Howard Norman
#18. With my childhood, it's a wonder I'm not psychotic. I was the little Jewish boy in the non-Jewish neighborhood. It was a little like being the first Negro enrolled in the all-white school. I grew up in libraries and among books, without friends.
Abraham Maslow
#19. Schools and libraries are the twin cornerstones of a civilized society. Libraries are only good if people use them, like books only exist when someone reads them.
Nicholas Meyer
#20. Love : so many people read about it in books and research on it in libraries yet so few discover the real feeling of it!
Avijeet Das
#21. When I grew up, there were locked cabinets in public libraries. You needed parental permission if you were under eighteen. I was let down by the overblown reputations of some hardcore fictional works.
Allan Gurganus
#22. The free access to information is not a privilege, but a necessity for any free society. One of my favorite things to do as a young man was wander through the stacks of my hometown library. I'd just browse until I found something interesting. Libraries have definitely changed my life.
Ed Asner
#23. A country that has few museums is both materially poor and spiritually poor ... Museums, like theaters and libraries, are a means to freedom.
Wendy Beckett
#24. Libraries remind us that truth isn't about who yells the loudest, but who has the right information. Because even as we're the most religious of people, America's innovative genius has always been preserved because we also have a deep faith in facts.
Barack Obama
#26. Seriously, some of my best friends are libraries.
Gabby Rivera
#27. For a person who grew up in the '30s and '40s in the segregated South, with so many doors closed without explanation to me, libraries and books said, 'Here I am, read me.' Over time I have learned I am at my best around books.
Maya Angelou
#28. Somebody's going to have to make the money to buy you all those books."
"They're free," Franny said. "I check them out of the library."
"Well, thank God for libraries," Caroline said.
Ann Patchett
#29. Before going back to college, i knew i didn't want to be an intellectual, spending my life in books and libraries without knowing what the hell is going on in the streets. Theory without practice is just as incomplete as practice without theory. The two have to go together.
Assata Shakur
#30. Today, if you want to access a typical out-of-print book, you have only one choice - fly to one of a handful of leading libraries in the country and hope to find it in the stacks.
Sergey Brin
#31. Librarians have always been among the most thoughtful and helpful people. They are teachers without a classroom. No libraries, no progress.
Willard Scott
#32. I remember visits to the local libraries and getting my own library cards as things of rite-of-passage significance.
Richard K. Morgan
#33. It's not just the books Alba craves, it's standing inside a place that houses millions of them. Libraries are Alba's churches, and the university library, containing one edition of every book ever published in England, is her cathedral.
Menna Van Praag
#34. The book can produce an addiction as fierce as heroin or nicotine, forcing us to spend much of our lives, like junkies, in book shops and libraries, those literary counterparts to the opium den.
Phillip Adams
#35. For all her faults, it was actually my mom who instilled in me a love of reading, and books, for which I will always be grateful. She's a complete bibliophile, so I've pretty much grown up around libraries and books.
Paula Gruben
#36. To ask why we need libraries at all, when there is so much information available elsewhere, is about as sensible as asking if roadmaps are necessary now that there are so very many roads.
[American Libraries Magazine, May 28, 2009]
Jon Bing
#37. [T]he only place on earth where immortality is provided is in libraries. This is the collective memory of humanity.
Temple Grandin
#38. I don't want to see libraries close; I want to find local solutions that will make them sustainable.
Alan Bennett
#39. The age of Lincoln and Jefferson memorials is over. It will be presidential libraries from now on.
Ada Louise Huxtable
#40. People question what I thought of Oxford. Students used to talk about the 'Oxford bubble' because the place can make you feel cut off from the rest of the world. I would forget there were places like London that were not centred round libraries and essays.
Samantha Shannon
#41. Successful people have libraries. The rest have big screen TVs
Jim Rohn
#42. Libraries should be the beating heart of the school, not mausoleums for dusty books.
Stephanie Harvey
#43. If you cut funding to libraries, you cut the lifeblood of our communities.
Richard M. Daley
#45. 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
#46. I remember the first book I bought, when I was about 11 ... Dad said, 'What have you got that for? What are libraries for?'
Kenneth Branagh
#47. I like libraries. It makes me feel comfortable and secure to have walls of words, beautiful and wise, all around me. I always feel better when I can see that there is something to hold back the shadows.
Roger Zelazny
#48. I'm still old-fashioned. I love dusty old books and libraries.
Harper Lee
#49. I love the grime, the real-life feel of things, the mix of dollar stores and libraries, high school students and prostitutes, little kids and dealers. What I like most about my Parkdale neighbourhood is that I can disappear.
Danila Botha
#50. It should be said upfront that I totally dig people who work in bookstores and libraries. They love books, and I love books, and that is all I really need to know. If they are friendly to me, then we are clearly soul mates.
Jami Attenberg
#51. Universities no longer spend as much time bragging about the size of their libraries. The
Seth Godin
#52. The justices have constitutionally protected obscenity in libraries, filth over cable television, and now unlimited internet pornography.
Phyllis Schlafly
#53. Despite our enormous brains and jam-packed libraries, we germ hotels cannot expect to understand absolutely everything.
Kurt Vonnegut
#54. Live in the serene peace of laboratories and libraries
Louis Pasteur
#55. I like libraries. It's a comfort that knowledge can be save for so long. That what we learn can be passed on.
Jackson Pearce
#56. Many existing top 20 Scottish writers have flourished in part because of good turns done by institutions, arts community, libraries and bookshops.
Sara Sheridan
#57. Libraries collect the works of genius of every language and every age.
George Bancroft
#58. Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote these books.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#59. What appalled Schiller about these libraries was that they featured nothing off the beaten track: no tattered paperbacks; no evidence of distinctive personal interests; no tokens of long intellectual detours passionately explored.
Brian Morton
#60. Exclusively oral cultures are unencumbered by dead knowledge, dead facts. Libraries, on the other hand, are full of them.
Huston Smith
#62. Seventy million books in America's libraries, but the one you want to read is always out.
Thomas Lansing Masson
#63. a light that made me think of long hours in dusty libraries, and old books, and silence.
Donna Tartt
#64. You don't learn about war by sitting in libraries. Though if people spent more time in libraries, maybe there would be fewer wars.
Joanne Hall
#65. Libraries can offer important alternatives to the services provided by the corporate sector, which will always have incentives to offer biased, limited, and costly access to knowledge.
John Palfrey
#66. There were two free public libraries within walking distance of my home; I remember taking six books home from every visit, the limit set by the library.
Martin Lewis Perl
#67. Libraries are, at heart, helpful and kind providers. It is hard for those who perhaps don't feel the need to visit their local libraries to understand what a vital service they provide for communities and individuals who do - and those who do are often the most vulnerable.
Robert Popple
#68. Libraries change lives. They are the soul of a people.
Diane Ackerman
#69. One day the rotting remains of their libraries will disintegrate so completely that they will be indistinguishable from the world's wrack of stray eddies and meaningless scribbles, the untide of heat death. The
Yoon Ha Lee
#71. The places of quiet are going away, the churches, the woods, the libraries. And it is only in silence we can hear the voice inside of us which gives us true peace.
James Rozoff
#72. I learned more about history and literature in the used bookstores in DC than in college libraries.
Douglas Brinkley
#73. Bookstores, libraries ... they're the closest thing I have to a church.
Jim C. Hines
#75. A bookworm-one of those men who are born to gnaw dead thoughts. His clothes, you see, are covered with the dust of libraries. He has no inward fountain of ideas ... " - "Earth's Holocaust", Hawthorne
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#76. I love learning. I love history. But there's history in everything. Every building, everybody you talk to. It's not limited to libraries and museums. I think people who spend their lives in school forget that sometimes. -Tak
Becky Chambers
#77. That's what I like so much about old libraries - they smell the way we'd like to imagine the past.
Ruth Reichl
#78. Libraries are a kind of communism which the least revolutionary among us may be proud to advocate.
Joseph Chamberlain
#79. If I finish a book a week, I will read only a few thousand books in my lifetime, about a tenth of a percent of the contents of the greatest libraries of our time. The trick is to know which books to read.
Carl Sagan
#80. A lot of my travel is at least partly work, visiting schools and libraries, especially in France.
Quentin Blake
#81. If a novelist were so uncouth and possessed of so little moral sense that he should write of illicit love, his book would be barred from the public libraries and he woukd be ostracized by society.
Clyde Brion Davis
#82. Like most of my friends in school, I was a member of multiple circulating libraries; and all of us, to begin with, borrowed and read the same things.
Aravind Adiga
#83. Schools across India do not have teachers, libraries, playing grounds and even toilets. I do not want to see empty classrooms, empty libraries. I do not want to see cattle grazing on fields meant to be cricket or football grounds.
Sachin Tendulkar
#84. Had I the power, I would scatter libraries over the whole land, as the sower sows his wheat-field.
Horace Mann
#85. Keeping libraries open, giving access to all children to all books is vital to our nation's sovereignty.
Karin Slaughter
#86. The truth is libraries are raucous clubhouses for free speech, controversy and community.
Paula Poundstone
#87. 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
#88. To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries.
Virginia Woolf
#89. Self-involved? Self-involved?!?" I jump to my feet, unable to sit still. "Let's talk about self-involved, Mr. Kissing Unsuspecting Girls in Libraries.
Tera Lynn Childs
#90. 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
#91. Libraries are the thin red line between civilization and barbarism.
[Libraries on the Front Lines, ALA interview 2011]
Neil Gaiman
#92. That's what I like so much about libraries, they smell the way we would like to imagine the past.
Ruth Reichl
#93. If we didn't already have libraries, they would now have to be invented. They are the keys to American success in fully exploiting the information superhighways of the future.
James H. Billington
#94. A voice saying that other word an alive thing must learn, that other word as necessary to living as taking in fuel and making of it movement, music, leaves, roots, dimetrodon spikes, dancing, libraries, children:
Yes! Yes! Yes!
Catherynne M Valente
#95. Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,
Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms,
Strong and content I travel the open road.
Walt Whitman
#96. Living in Edinburgh, I consider myself particularly lucky - we have the biggest book festival in the world, a plethora of fascinating libraries and museums, and some of the greatest architecture in Europe.
Sara Sheridan
#97. ... bums on the outside, libraries inside.
Ray Bradbury
#98. His true monument lies not on the shelves of libraries, but in the thoughts of men, and in the history of more than one science.
{Gibbs's obituary for scientist Rudolf Clausius}
Josiah Willard Gibbs
#99. I would say television is a focus, and expanding our channel platform is a focus. As for buying libraries, when catalogs are going down in value, the answer is that it's all about price!
Jon Feltheimer
#100. I die and go to a library? Sure, it could be worse, but I've spent a lot of time in libraries this year. Quite enough time, really. Do I have to stay forever? Where do I go pee?
Brent Weeks
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