Libraries Quotes - Page 5

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.

Libraries are congenial places but unfortunately none of us like these places because we hates books and books are leading us to better direction.

The most important thing of all was not the poverty of its ess

A library is a place to go for a reality check, a bracing dose of literature, or a "true reflection of our history," whether it's a brick-and-mortar building constructed a century ago or a fanciful arrangement of computer codes. The librarian is the organizer, the animating spirit behind it, and the navigator. Her job is to create order out of the confusion of the past, even as she enables us to blast into the future.

Here was one place where I could find out who I was and what I was going to become. And that was the public library.

Let us save what remains: not by vaults and locks which fence them from the public eye and use in consigning them to the waste of time, but by such a multiplication of copies, as shall place them beyond the reach of accident.

Librarians have always been among the most thoughtful and helpful people. They are teachers without a classroom. No libraries, no progress.

An original idea. That can't be too hard. The library must be full of them.

There are no such things as book hoarders, only aspiring librarians

She hadn't met Earth or Fire, the other two cousins, but she'd filled a couple of library requests for each of them in the past week. If they were around, they would help her. Wouldn't they?

I mean, public libraries like this one were always short of money, so building even the tiniest of labyrinths had to be beyond their means.

Libraries are sexual dream factories. The langour brings it on.

The library is the worst group of people ever assembled in history. They're mean, conniving, rude, and extremely well-read, which makes them dangerous.

The shelves were supposed to be loaded with books—but they were, of course, really doors: each book-lid opened as exciting as Alice putting her gold key in the lock. I spent days running in and out of other worlds like a time bandit, or a spy. I was as excited as I’ve ever been in my life, in that library: scoring new books the minute they came in; ordering books I’d heard of—then waiting, fevered, for them to arrive, like they were the word Christmas.

My mother explained the magic with this washing machine the very, very first day. She said, 'Now Hans, we have loaded the laundry. The machine will make the work. And now we can go to the library.' Because this is the magic: you load the laundry, and what do you get out of the machine? You get books out of the machines, children's books.

She strolled between shelves, looking at titles, smiling as she met old friends - books she had read three times or five times or a dozen. Just a title, or an author's name, would be enough to summon up happy images. Strange creatures like phoenixes and psammeads, moving under smokey London daylight of a hundred years before, in company with groups of bemused children; starships and new worlds and the limitless vistas of interstellar night, outer space challenged but never conquered; princesses in silver and golden dresses, princes and heroes carrying swords like sharpened lines of light, monsters rising out of weedy tarns, wild creatures that talked and tricked one another...

There is a value to books—unhackable, paper books—that measures far beyond mere ink and paper.

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...

Whatever you call me, my parents encouraged me to go to college and become a book lover, and to trust that I could do nearly anything if I could find the right book at the library.It was true; books had saved me in my home remodeling projects, but they fell short in teaching me how to trust my instincts, and how to stop thinking with my educated brain and more with my kneecaps and butt cheeks.

Books on the bookshelvesAnd stacked on the floorBooks kept in basketsAnd propped by the doorBooks in neat pilesAnd in disarrayBooks tucked in closetsAnd books on displayBooks filling cranniesAnd books packed in nooksBooks massed in windowsAnd mounded in crooksLibraries beckonAnd bookstores inviteBut book-filled rooms welcomeUs back home at night!

I found that I could not contemplate an adult life in which books were not dominant. I wanted to live and work with them...I had to be able to take books from their places, run my finger over their backs, see how they opened, flick their corners straight. I wanted a perspective of bookshelves always in my eye. And books, books, books. This was not a rational way of determining on a career and was much tainted by mushiness. But it was the way in which my decision hardened, before I was fifteen years old, to become a librarian.

Just as we may, through an appalled realization that we were unaware of what was going on in the mind of one we thought we knew, come to wonder how we ever know what another person is thinking or feeling, so too we may, having on some occasion wanted badly to understand and having clearly failed, come to wonder how we ever manage to understand, and how we know that we have succeeded.

Knowing I lov'd my books, he furnish'd me From mine own library with volumes that I prize above my dukedom.

The idea of a library full of books, the books full of knowledge, fills me with fear and love and courage and endless wonder.

There is no fighting in the Library. Anyone who starts a fight or responds to a challenge will be thrown out. You may think you can take me. You're probably right. But none of you can take the Library.

The only way to make a library safe is to lock people out of it. As long as they are allowed to read the books 'any old time they have a mind to,' libraries will remain the nurseries of heresy and independence of thought. They will, in fact, preserve that freedom which is a far more important part of our lives than any ideology or orthodoxy, the freedom that dissolves orthodoxies and inspires solutions to the ever-changing challenges of the future. I hope that your library and mine will continue in this way to be dangerous for many years to come.

A library in the middle of a community is a cross between an emergency exit, a life raft and a festival. They are cathedrals of the mind; hospitals of the soul; theme parks of the imagination.

I was born, and then I was quietly resentful of that fact for a few years...but then I went to a library and it was okay.

Libraries are the thin red line between civilization and barba

You don't spend your life hanging around books without learning a thing or two.

It's still National Library Week. You should be especially nice to a librarian today, or tomorrow. Sometime this week, anyway. Probably the librarians would like tea. Or chocolates. Or a reliable source of funding.

We were all serious readers, sitting on wooden chairs at rows of lecterns, turning the pages, united in mutual love of isolation.

She wore heavy sandals, with socks. No kid in the entire state of Mississippi wore black socks in the summer. Shoot, if I wasn't standing smack-dab in the middle of the library, I wouldn't be wearing shoes.

At the moment that we persuade a child, any child, to cross that threshold, that magic threshold into a library, we change their lives forever, for the better.

In the nonstop tsunami of global information, librarians provide us with floaties and teach us how to swim. – Linton Weeks, Washington Post, 13 January 2001

The librarian was explaining the benefits of the Dewey decimal system to her junior—benefits that extended to every area of life. It was orderly, like the universe. It had logic. It was dependable. Using it allowed a kind of moral uplift, as one's own chaos was also brought under control.'Whenever I am troubled,' said the librarian, 'I think about the Dewey decimal system.''Then what happens?' asked the junior, rather overawed.'Then I understand that trouble is just something that has been filed in the wrong place. That is what Jung was explaining of course—as the chaos of our unconscious contents strive to find their rightful place in the index of consciousness.

Within a year or two, however, a couple of the first things I wrote – ‘Anarchy In The UK’ and ‘God Save The Queen’ – really hit their target. I’d like to thank the British public library system: that was my training ground, that’s where I learned to throw those verbal grenades. I wasn’t just throwing bricks through shop windows as a voice of rebellion, I was throwing words where they really mattered. Words count.

I became interested in librarians while researching my first book, about obituaries. With the exception of a few showy eccentrics, like the former soldier in Hitler's army who had a sex change and took up professional whistling, the most engaging obit subjects were librarians. An obituary of a librarian could be about anything under the sun, a woman with a phenomenal memory, who recalled the books her aging patrons read as children—and was also, incidentally, the best sailor on her stretch of the Maine coast—or a man obsessed with maps, who helped automate the Library of Congress's map catalog and paved the way for wonders like Google Maps.

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.

To build up a library is to create a life. It's never just a random collection of books.

In common with librarians the world over, the two women were used to dealing with a disproportionate quota of odd people acting strangely.

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.

I find that when I come out of the library I’m in what I call the library bliss of being totally taken away from the distractions of li

And Marianne, who had the knack of finding her way in every house to the library, however it might be avoided by the family in general, soon procured herself a book.

...I am still librarian in your house, for I never was dismissed, and never gave up the office. Now I am librarian here as well.''But you have just told me you were sexton here!''So I am. It is much the same profession. Except you are a true sexton, books are but dead bodies to you, and a library nothing but a catacomb!

I do not understand people who will lustily throw $40,000 at the shiny red automobile of their choice, but well up with tears and become outraged when they are asked to pay $5 for a damaged videotape. Either they are fucked up and their priorities are fucked up or I am fucked up and my priorities are fucked up. Because I am me, I think it is them.

Whatever the cost of our libraries, the price is cheap compared to that of an ignorant nation.

...it's appalling to remember that the entire Oxford University Library was sold for scrap in the mid-1500s. Nor was that situation unique to Oxford, as libraries were deconstructed throughout the land.

People flock in, nevertheless, in search of answers to those questions only librarians are considered to be able to answer, such as "Is this the laundry?" "How do you spell surreptitious?" and, on a regular basis, "Do you have a book I remember reading once? It had a red cover and it turned out they were twins.

Libraries really are the gates to the future. So it is unfortunate that, round the world, we observe local authorities seizing the opportunity to close libraries as an easy way to save money, without realising that they are stealing from the future to pay for today. They are closing the gates that should be open.

She was a poetry book with the wrong dust jacket, shelved in the Reference section.

It had always been my habit-- privately I felt it to be an ecstasy-- to enter, as into a mysterious vault, any public library. I was drawn to books that had been read before, novels that girls like myself had cradled and cherished. In my mind-- I suppose in my isolation-- I seized on all those previous readers, and everyone who would read after me, as phantom companions and secret friends.

The library was a great sprawling complex with rolls and rolls of paper tucked into many shelves. Between the reading rooms were courtyards with living fountains and singing birds and butterflies that would transform into handsome young women to guide or entertain anyone who stayed there any length of time. I saw one among the stacks, explaining an older style of calligraphy to the newly appointed Heavenly Marine Official of the South China Sea. In another wing, a librarian stepped from her chrysalis for the first time, reciting T’ang Dynasty poetry to the flowers. That’s how I knew I was in the right section.

...a library is not just a reference service: it is also a place for the vulnerable. From the elderly gentleman whose only remaining human interaction is with library staff, to the isolated young mother who relishes the support and friendship that grows from a Baby Rhyme Time session, to a slow moving 30-something woman collecting her CDs, libraries are a haven in a world where community services are being ground down to nothing. I've always known libraries are vital, but now I understand that their worth cannot be measured in books alone.

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.

For him that stealeth, or borroweth and returneth not, this book from its owner,Let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him. Let him be struck with palsy and all his members blasted. Let him languish in pain crying out for mercy, Let there be no surcease to his agony till he sink in dissolution. Let bookworms gnaw his entrails in token of the worm that dieth not.When at last he goeth to his final punishment, Let the flames of Hell consume him forever.[attributed to the Monastery of San Pedro in Barcelona, Spain]

I walked straight to the library. Mrs. Bloom, the librarian, always knows everything.

You see, I don't belive that libraries should be drab places where people sit in silence, that has been the main reason for our policy of employing wild animals as librarians.

Now, public libraries are most admirable institutions, but they have one irritating custom. They want their books back.

What is more important to a library than anything else -- than everything else -- is the fact that it exists.", American Scholar; Washington, DC, June 5, 1972]