Quotes About Libraries And Reading

#1. 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

#2. All libraries must submit to a certain order, I answered. Indeed, agreed the professor, or all will be lost. The fall of nations and empires begins with the fall of libraries.

Rawi Hage

#3. 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

#4. In his library he had been always sure of leisure and tranquility; and though prepared, as he told Elizabeth, to meet with folly and conceit in every other room in the house, he was used to be free from them there

Jane Austen

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. The purpose of the Sisterhood of Librarians is to keep the secret of creative juice and keep the idea of libraries alive.

S.A. Tawks

#9. When you steal from the library, you are preventing anyone else from reading that book, and the very notion makes me want to drop you in the Void.

Piers Anthony

#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. 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

#12. I was a hugely unchaperoned reader, and I would wander into my local public library and there sat the world, waiting for me to look at it, to find out about it, to discover who I might be inside it.
[Patrick Ness slams library cuts (The Guardian, 23 June 2011)]

Patrick Ness

#13. I ransack public libraries, and find them full of sunk treasure.

Virginia Woolf

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. I started reading. I read everything I could get my hands on ... By the time I was thirteen I had read myself out of Harlem. I had read every book in two libraries and had a card for the Forty-Second Street branch.

James A. Baldwin

#18. And, the treasure? A library card: key to all the doors in the story world.

Trudy Wallis

#19. The fact is that our kids aren't reading books - or frankly, much of anything lately. Schools are under funded, some schools even closing their libraries. Parents have to realize that it's their job, and not the school's job, to get kids into the habit of reading for fun.

James Patterson

#20. Libraries are starting places for the adventure of learning that can go on whatever one's vocation and location in life. Reading is an adventure like that of discovery itself. Libraries are our base camp.

James H. Billington

#21. Libraries allow children to ask questions about the world and find the answers. And the wonderful thing is that once a child learns to use a library, the doors to learning are always open.

Laura Bush

#22. By establishing reading societies, and subscription libraries, and taking these under our direction, and supplying them through our labors, we may turn the public mind which way we will.

Adam Weishaupt

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. He liked bookstores, and libraries too. They had a sacred, peaceful hush, like graveyards without the shadow of death.

Garrett Leigh

#26. As parents, we have to find the time and the energy to step in and help our children love reading. We can read to them, talk to them about what they're reading, and make time for this by turning off the television set ourselves. Libraries are a critical tool to help parents do this.

Barack Obama

#27. A library, no matter how big or small, is a careful balance of love and responsibility. A machine, if you will, cranked by those who care most about reading.

Kimberly Karalius

#28. I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it's better than college. People should educate themselves
you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of 10 years, I had read every book in the library and I'd written a thousand stories.

Ray Bradbury

#29. A library should fill our leisure with adventure. It is a refuge from the commonplace and the dull, a sanctuary where all the trials, the tribulations, and the boredoms of the outer world are forbidden and where such an evil thing as a tax-collector may be forgotten and, peradventure, forgiven.

E. Norman Torry

#30. 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

#31. 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

#32. 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

#33. 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

#34. Democracy or reading, democracy of space: our public library tradition, wherever we live in the wide world, was incredibly hard-won for us by the generations before us and ought to be protected, not just for ourselves but in the name of every generation after us.

Ali Smith

#35. Libraries are a consistent and major source of books for free reading.

Stephen D. Krashen

#36. Betsy returned to her chair, took off her coat and hat, opened her book and forgot the world again.

Maud Hart Lovelace

#37. A library is a hospital for the mind. - Anonymous

Alvin Toffler

#38. For I bless God in the libraries of the learned and for all the booksellers in the world.

Christopher Smart

#39. 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

#40. 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

#41. Welcome young poet, in here you are free
to follow your star to where you should be.
That door of the library was the door into me
And Lorca and Shelley said "Come to the feast."
Whitechapel Library, Aldgate East.

Bernard Kops