Top 100 Quotes About Libraries And Books
#1. 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
#2. Art shouldn't be locked away in galleries and libraries and books. Art should be for everybody and not just art buffs, historians and so-called experts.
Julian Beever
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. Her library is a meeting place for all who love books. They discuss matters of the world and matters of the spirit.
Jeanette Winter
#7. 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
#8. The library was quiet. It was busy but it was quiet and I thought it must be like this in a monastery where you had company and sympathy but your thoughts were your own.
Jeanette Winterson
#9. a light that made me think of long hours in dusty libraries, and old books, and silence.
Donna Tartt
#10. Is anything illegal here?' Addison asked.
'Library late fines are stiff. Ten lashes a day, and that's just for paperbacks.
'There's a library?'
'Two. Though one won't lend because all the books are bound in human skin and quite valuable.
Ransom Riggs
#11. In 1986 we were trying to help women get in print, stay in print, and come to the attention of booksellers and libraries. At that time, books by men mystery writers were reviewed seven times as often as books by women.
Sara Paretsky
#12. Libraries are fascinating places; sometimes you feel you are under the canopy of a railway station, and when you read books about exotic places there's a feeling of traveling to distant lands.
Umberto Eco
#13. Libraries are where most of us really fall in love with books, where we can browse and choose on our own. Its really one of the first autonomous things we do, picking the books we want to read.
Kim Boykin
#14. You must write every single day of your life ... 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 ... may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.
Ray Bradbury
#16. Our libraries are valuable centers of education, learning and enrichment for people of all ages. In recent years, libraries have taken on an increasingly important role. today's libraries are about much more than books.
Jodi Rell
#17. In a few minutes I heard the books' voices: a low, steady, unsupressible hum. I'd heard it many times before. I've always had a finely tuned ear for a library's accumulations of echo and desire. Libraries are anything but hushed.
Martha Cooley
#18. 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
#19. From fire, water, the passage of time, neglectful readers, and the hand of the censor, each of my books has escaped to tell me its story.
Alberto Manguel
#20. A good library will never be too neat, or too dusty, because somebody will always be in it, taking books off the shelves and staying up late reading them.
Lemony Snicket
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. Digital books and other texts are increasingly coming under the control of distributors and other gatekeepers rather than readers and libraries.
Jonathan Zittrain
#24. Television and film are our libraries now. Our history books.
David Strathairn
#25. You are a total stranger and you want to take my library book.
Elizabeth Kostova
#26. 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
#27. I collect books, and I love libraries. I love bookstores. And to me meeting a writer is important. And when I saw a book with my name on it I almost passed out.
Angelina Jolie
#28. I've always liked libraries. They're quiet and full of books and full of knowledge.
Haruki Murakami
#29. I hate libraries for the way they put stickers on things. I don't approve of folding over pages, or of writing in books. And scissors - that's beyond the pale.
Jonathan Lethem
#30. She just wanted - had always wanted - a good book to read. Being chased by hellhounds and blowing things up were comparatively unimportant parts of the job. Getting the books - now, that was what *really* mattered to her.
Genevieve Cogman
#31. As for reading, I wish I had a magic door to a library where I could go in, read for days and days, and come back in the same minute I left. I'm still looking for the door.
David Mitchell
#32. Civilization is knowledge, even more than it is urbanization, for you cannot have the latter without the former. Everything builds on everything else. And the knowledge of civilization is kept in repositories known as ... LIBRARIES, and if books burn, civilization burns with them.
James Turner
#33. Libraries' most powerful asset is the conversation they provide - between books and readers, between children and parents, between individuals and the collective world. Take them away and those voices turn inwards or vanish. Turns out that libraries have nothing at all to do with silence.
Bella Bathurst
#34. Sometimes he spent hours together in the great libraries of Paris, those catacombs of departed authors, rummaging among their hoards of dusty and obsolete works in quest of food for his unhealthy appetite. He was, in a manner, a literary ghoul, feeding in the charnel-house of decayed literature.
Washington Irving
#35. Morris tried to keep the books in some sort of order, but they always mixed themselves up. The tragedies needed cheering up and would visit with the comedies. The encyclopedias, weary of facts, would relax with the comic books and fictions. All in all it was an agreeable jumble.
William Joyce
#36. Where do dreams come from?
... they slink out of books, they lurk in the stacks of libraries. Out of pages turned they rise like the scent of peonies and infect the brain with their promises.
Marge Piercy
#37. Someday it will dawn on man that woman does not read the wonderful books with which he has filled his libraries, and though she may well admire his marvelous works of art in museums she herself will rarely create, only copy.
Esther Vilar
#38. As it is she will probably turn out to be one of these acid-faced virgins that sit behind little desks in public libraries and stamp dates in books.
Raymond Chandler
#39. You come to work because the office is a resource: The office is a place where you can meet with other people, and the office has libraries of books and information on CD-ROM that might help you with your work.
Jay Chiat
#40. I'm still old-fashioned. I love dusty old books and libraries.
Harper Lee
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. Time has become quiet flexible inside the library. (This is true of most places with interesting books. Sit down to read for twenty minutes, and suddenly it's dark, with no clue as to where the hours have gone.)
Ellen Klages
#50. There is a value to books - unhackable, paper books - that measures far beyond mere ink and paper.
Richard Due
#51. 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
#52. I didn't like seeing books damaged. I'd seen enough burned-out schoolhouses and libraries in my first life.
Andrew Smith
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. Millions of pages cloaked in dust and inspiration and wisdom.
Sarah Noffke
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. Books and bottles breed generosity, and the bibliophile and the oenophile og through life scattering largesse from their libraries and cellars
Holless Wilbur Allen
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. One of the many reasons I love libraries. Everyone is lost and not wanting to be found in a library.
Sarah Noffke
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. Fields are places in books, and books are placed in libraries.
Morrissey
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. We should do our best to satisfy your interests in stories and books and the world. There are libraries.
Neil Gaiman
#71. He liked bookstores, and libraries too. They had a sacred, peaceful hush, like graveyards without the shadow of death.
Garrett Leigh
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. Libraries are about books. Books have no color. And they don't care who reads them.
Augusta Scattergood
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. Betsy returned to her chair, took off her coat and hat, opened her book and forgot the world again.
Maud Hart Lovelace
#86. Libraries are a consistent and major source of books for free reading.
Stephen D. Krashen
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. When I was his age, and even today, when it comes to books and libraries, too much is never enough
Josh Hanagarne
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. 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
