Reading And Library Quotes

#1. As a kid, I went to the library because, in books, there were people really living lives, and unlike my parents, they talked to me about important things.

Gregory Sherl

#2. She liked to sit on the front porch in the afternoons and read books she'd checked out from the library. Aside from coffee, reading was her only indulgence.

Nicholas Sparks

#3. My mum was a children's librarian, so I spent a lot of time in the library. My reading life, because of my mum's work, was evenly split between American, Canadian, Australian and British authors.

Eleanor Catton

#4. 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

#5. It is that kind of thinking that is the problem; that movies, video games and the Internet, devices that simply amuse the imagination are more interesting than what a library stocks.

S.A. Tawks

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

Lailah Gifty Akita

#7. Our house has a library - it seemed better use of the space than as a dining room! - and I try to spend as much time in there as possible. There's nothing better while reading or writing than to be surrounded by books.

Adam Christopher

#8. I'm reading more than ever. I've started on the left wall of the Carnegie Library and plan to read my way around the room.

Frances Mayes

#9. When we are reading, a voice comes to us as in the dark and whispers, "Imagine!" Samuel Beckett
as told by Bill Moyer in the Foreword he wrote for, The Public Library: A Photographic Essay by Robert Dawson. Afterword by Ann Patchett

Samuel Beckett

#10. Great bodies die but great minds don't die! Inside the tomb of great men lay dead body's but at the library of great men lay the living minds of dead bodies!

Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. That perfect tranquility of life, which is nowhere to be found but in retreat, a faithful friend and a good library.

Aphra Behn

#14. I grew up listening to my father argue politics into the night and taking trips every Saturday to the Hood River library where my mother maintained her interest in reading and encouraged the same from her sons.

Dale T. Mortensen

#15. 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

#16. I couldn't live a week without a private library - indeed, I'd part with all my furniture and squat and sleep on the floor before I'd let go of the 1500 or so books I possess.

H.P. Lovecraft

#17. The library was open for one hour after school let out. I hid there, looking at art books and reading poetry.

Lynda Barry

#18. Do you ever hide books you've read over and over again because you're so sick of them?'

'Oh, definitely. When they ask for them, I say the book fairy came to get it. One time they saw one of the books at the library, so now they think the librarians are book fairies.

Gina Sheridan

#19. The secret of a good librarian is that he never reads anything more of the literature in his charge than the title and the table of contents. Anyone who lets himself go and starts reading a book is lost as a librarian ... He's bound to lose perspective.

Robert Musil

#20. I was the kid who read a lot and who was academic, and who was more of an indoor person than an outdoor person. I would win the summer reading contest at the library.

Julianne Moore

#21. When we got around to books, I was finally set, as our minister would say, on solid ground. I gorged on books. I sneaked them at night. I rubbed their spines and sniffed in the musty smell of them in the library.

Lorene Cary

#22. I remember I was in grade school, the fourth grade, in a free reading period in the library. Someone in my class found a copy of the Forbes 400, a list of the richest people in America, and my dad's name was on it.

Jamie Johnson

#23. I was a library rat and a bookworm. I read all the time. I walked to school reading books. I read under my desk.

Chelsea Cain

#24. 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

#25. We are digital archives of the African Pliocene, even of Devonian seas; walking repositories of wisdom out of the old days. You could spend a lifetime reading in this ancient library and die unsated by the wonder of it.

Richard Dawkins

#26. When I was a child, it was a matter of pride that I could plow through a Nancy Drew story in one afternoon, and begin another in the evening ... I was probably trying to impress the librarians who kept me supplied with books.

Kathleen Norris

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

Trudy Wallis

#28. And every book, you find, has its own social group
friends of its own it wants to introduce you to, like a party in the library that need never, ever end.

Caitlin Moran

#29. 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

#30. Francie thought that all the books in the world were in that library and she had a plan about reading all the books in the world.

Betty Smith

#31. One day, she ventured to the palace library and was delighted to find what good company books could be.

E. Lockhart

#32. After our weekly trip to the library, she cleared the top of her dresser and set out her week's reading, stood them on their ends, pages fanned out, sending little puffs of text into the air.

Eleanor Brown

#33. I had no books at home. I started to frequent a public library in Lisbon. It was there, with no help except curiosity and the will to learn, that my taste for reading developed and was refined.

Jose Saramago

#34. I was looking at books and reading the indexes and finding a next book and reading that book, and then from that index ... It was a version of surfing the internet before the internet. I was surfing the New York Public Library. It was back when you had to fill out a form and put it in a chute.

Lisa Yuskavage

#35. The thing about books was, the more you read and liked them, the more you wanted to have on hand to read. Before you knew it you needed more bookshelves, and then all of the sudden they filled your house.

Sui Ishida

#36. I stubbed my toe just as someone dropped a book into the inside drop box. As I yelped and howled in pain, a child on the other side said,

'Mommy, I think we hurt the book!

Gina Sheridan

#37. I'm a fastidious bookman and have never liked reading books with library markings or other messy defects.

Larry McMurtry

#38. If I were founding a university I would begin with a smoking room; next a dormitory; and then a decent reading room and a library. After that, if I still had more money that I couldn't use, I would hire a professor and get some text books.

Stephen Leacock

#39. Seriously?" Spartacus looked amazed. "I thought this looked the same to everyone. We're in a massive library that stretches all the way to the sky. It's beautiful, with oak and teak shelves, gorgeous patterns in the wood, and beautiful books. There's endless amounts to read and look at.

Kaza Kingsley

#40. 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

#41. We may sit in our library and yet be in all quarters of the earth.

John Lubbock

#42. I didn't even enter a bookshop until I was 14 because I couldn't afford books until I got my first Saturday job, but by the time I was six or seven, I spent practically every Saturday down my local library reading as much as I could and getting out as many books as I could.

Malorie Blackman

#43. As a kid, I went from reading kids' books to reading science fiction to reading, you know, adult fiction. There was never any gap. YA was a thing when I was a teenager, but it was a library category, not a marketing category, and you never really felt like it was a huge section.

John Allison

#44. I had a serious library at my disposal, because my Popo believed that culture entered by osmosis and it was better to start early, but my favorite books were fairy tales.

Isabel Allende

#45. I couldn't find a decent threesome guidebook at the library, so I started scouring the Internet, reading biographies, and asking lots of people lots of questions. As it turns out, America is full of trisexuals eager to tell their stories.

Victoria Vantoch

#46. I began reading everyhing in the family library. Kidnapped, Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe. And of course, if you're running out of books to read you can always read Shakespeare.

Robin Hobb

#47. We give scholarships to high school kids and a new library of books to every preschool child in the county where I was born. I didn't have books at home so I did all my reading at school. I love books and I believe that helping kids to read gives them a great start in life.

Dolly Parton

#48. Immersing myself in Shakespeare's plays, reading them closely under the guidance of a brilliant, plain-spoken professor changed my life: It opened up the great questions; it put my petty problems into perspective. It got me out of bed in the mornings and kept me in the library late into the night.

Jhumpa Lahiri

#49. 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

#50. Some say they get lost in books, but I find myself, again and again, in the pages of a good book. Humanly speaking, there is no greater teacher, no greater therapist, no greater healer of the soul, than a well-stocked library.

L.R. Knost

#51. Maybe Heaven will be a library and then I might get to finish my 'to-read' list.

Kellie Elmore

#52. I was an early reader, reading even before kindergarten, and since we did not have books in my home, my older brother, Alexander, was responsible for our trip every week to the public library to exchange books already read for new ones to be read.

Rosalyn Sussman Yalow

#53. My mother brought us to the library every week, and I read a lot. That's what kept me company. I went from school to school, but there was always reading.

Julianne Moore

#54. Go ahead, and fear not. You will have a full library at your service.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

#55. There is a somewhat time-worn joke about people taking up library work because they like to read : the joke consisting of the fact that librarians have so little time to read. But, I tell you, those who do not, and there are some, are in the wrong profession.

Mary Virginia Provines

#56. The public library is where place and possibility meet.

Stuart Dybek

#57. All I wanted to do was go back inside to the library and read a book.I used to spend all my time reading books, or watching television. It was safe. Nobody ever was hurt or teased or looked stupid while reading books or watching television.

Kathryn Magendie

#58. Heaven would be a comfortable chair, a library, Diet Coke, and an occasional cheese pizza. Sex once in a while. No talking. ~ Drew Stirling

Jayden Hunter

#59. 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

#60. 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

#61. He pointed the scepter around the library and had an instant input of all of the books that were there into his brain, as if he had read them all at once.

Kaza Kingsley

#62. 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

#63. 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

#64. 'Anna Karenina.' I read it in college. I was so engrossed that I couldn't stop reading it and neglected all my other studies. I would go to the library even on nice warm weekends and just lock myself up. I think that was the first time that I felt transformed by a book.

Jonathan Dee

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

Garrett Leigh

#66. My mother always kept library books in the house, and one rainy Sunday afternoon - this was before television, and we didn't even have a radio - I picked up a book to look at the pictures and discovered I was reading and enjoying what I read.

Beverly Cleary

#67. If books were girls and reading was s-ss-ssss-fucking, this would be the biggest whorehouse in the county and I'd be the most ruthless pimp you ever met. Whap the girls on the butts and send them off to their tricks as fast and often as I can.

Joe Hill

#68. I'm being forced to challenge ideas that have kept me safe for so long. There's an entire library of information in my head, and suddenly I can't decide if any of it is worth reading.

Louise Gornall

#69. I was always furious because you couldn't take out more than three books in one day. You would go home with your three books and read them and it would still be only five o'clock. The library didn't shut till half past, but you couldn't change the books till the next day.

Fay Weldon

#70. For 'Boxers & Saints,' I started by reading a couple of articles on the Internet, then writing a really rough outline, then getting more hardcore into the research. I went to a university library once a week for a year, year and a half.

Gene Luen Yang

#71. 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

#72. Doctor Who: You want weapons? We're in a library. Books are the best weapon in the world. This room's the greatest arsenal we could have. Arm yourself!
(from Tooth and Claw in Season 2)

Russell T. Davies

#73. There's no architect who doesn't want to build a library - and I am no different. With so much scrutiny now attached to reading - because of technology and how we approach it as a social activity - that is a very exciting area in architecture.

Annabelle Selldorf

#74. When you juice books from a library you are taking the history and imagination that has accumulated over so many years there.

S.A. Tawks

#75. He began reading her eyes more deeply and passionately than the books in the library.

Avijeet Das

#76. Want to inspire your kids to read more? Try giving them kids some money to spend just on a book. Take them to a bookstore and let them browse and pick out one book that they will love. Or try going to a local library for a few hours and just let your kids sift through books that interest them.

Melanie Kirk

#77. There are distinct duties of a poet laureate. I plan a reading series at the Library of Congress and advise the librarian. The rest is how I want to promote poetry.

Rita Dove

#78. 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

#79. Of all things I liked books best. My father had a large library and whenever I could manage I tried to satisfy my passion for reading.

Nikola Tesla

#80. Our library isn't very extensive," said Anne, "but every book in it is a friend. We've picked our books up through the years, here and there, never buying one until we had first read it and knew that it belonged to the race of Joseph.

L.M. Montgomery

#81. 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

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

Christopher Smart

#83. Had she read any good books lately? At all? She could tell him that she was going to take out a subscription at the library tomorrow because she was feeling starved of good reading material and could he recommend anything that she might not already have read?

Mary Balogh

#84. Reading old Gray? That's right. Physician's library just three books: 'Gray's Anatomy' and Bible and Shakespeare. Study. You may become great doctor.

Sinclair Lewis

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

Alvin Toffler

#86. A library is such a potent symbol of a town's values: each one closed down might as well be six thousand stickers plastered over every available surface, reading WE CHOSE TO BECOME MORE STUPID AND DULL.

Caitlin Moran

#87. For years I have been coming to this library, and I explore it volume by volume, shelf by shelf, but I could demonstrate to you that I have done nothing but continue the reading of a single book.

Italo Calvino

#88. She sighed and looked at him sympathetically. 'Cool flame tricks aside, there's no competition.'
He lifted his eyebrow. 'Library wins?'
'Every single time.

Elizabeth Hunter

#89. When I go to a library and I see the librarian at her desk reading, I'm afraid to interrupt her, even though she sits there specifically so that she may be interrupted, even though being interrupted for reasons like this by people like me is her very job.

Aaron Swartz

#90. I liked reading and working out my ideas in the midst of that endless crowd walking in and out of the (library) looking for something. I, too, was seeking fame and fortune by sitting at the end of a long golden table next to the sets of American authors on the open shelves.

Alfred Kazin

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

Maud Hart Lovelace

#92. I view askance a book that remains undisturbed for a year. Oughtn't it to have a ticket of leave? I think I may safely say no bookin my library remains unopened a year at a time, except my own works and Tennyson's.

Carolyn Wells

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

Stephen D. Krashen

#94. When I was about thirteen, the library was going to get 'Calculus for the Practical Man.' By this time I knew, from reading the encyclopedia, that calculus was an important and interesting subject, and I ought to learn it.

Richard P. Feynman

#95. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market alow you to put there.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#96. In the library I felt better, words you could trust and look at till you understood them, they couldn't change half way through a sentence like people, so it was easier to spot a lie.

Jeanette Winterson

#97. 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

#98. From the time I could read, I found solace in my father's library...At the ages of ten and eleven and twelve I would have preferred to remain in the library...

Alice Hoffman

#99. I am the girl who spends hours huddled in a corner of a library, trying to find what you love the most about Marlowe, just so I can write you a poem worthy of Shakespeare. I've made books my lovers, hours my enemies and you the only story.

Nikita Gill

#100. 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