Library quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

I discovered me in the library. I went to find me in the library.

It had that comfortably sprung, lived-in look that library books with a lively circulation always get; bent page corners, a dab of mustard on page 331, a whiff of some reader's spilled after-dinner whiskey on page 468. Only library books speak with such wordless eloquence of the power good stories hold over us, how good stories abide, unchanged and mutely wise, while we poor humans grow older and slower.

Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.

Thomas Jefferson

They should let some people into the library by prescription only

Chuck Palahniuk

How do you explain to somebody who doesn't understand that you don't build a library to read. A library is a resource. Something you go to, for reference, as and when. But also something you simply look at, because it gives you succour, answers to some idea of who you are or, more to the point, who you would like to be, who you will be once you own every book you need to own.

Howard Jacobson

Your brain, Peekay, has two functions; it is a place for original thought, but also it is a reference library. Use it to tell you where to look, and then you will have for yourself all the brains that have ever been

Bryce Courtenay

We are all a volume on the shelf of the... library, a story unto ourselves, never possibly described with one word or even very accurately with thousands.

A library is a place that is a repository of information and gives every citizen equal access to it. That includes health information. And mental health information. It's a community space. It's a place of safety, a haven from the world.

The smell of the library was always the same – the musty odour of old clothes mixed with the keener scent of unwashed bodies, creating what the chief librarian had once described as "the steam of the social soup".

Years later he'd stood in the charred ruins of a library where blackened books lay in pools of water. Shelves tipped over. Some rage at the lies arranged in their thousands row on row. He picked up one of the books and thumbed through the heavy bloated pages. He'd not have thought the value of the smallest thing predicated on a world to come. It surprised him. That the space which these things occupied was itself an expectation.

Cormac McCarthy

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

A bookshelf is as particular to its owner as are his or her clothes; a personality is stamped on a library just as a shoe is shaped by the foot.

I read library books as fast as I could go, rushing them home in the basket of my bicycle. From the minute I reached our house, I started to read. Every book I seized on, from Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue at Camp Rest-a-While to Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, stood for the devouring wish to read being instantly granted. I knew this was bliss, knew it at the time. Taste isn't nearly so important; it comes in its own time.

The librarian isn't a clerk who happens to work at a library. A librarian is a data hound, a guide, a sherpa and a teacher. The librarian is the interface between reams of data and the untrained but motivated user.

[The Classification Research Group was] a typical British affair, with no resources beyond the native wit of its members, no allegiance to any existing system of classification, no fixed target, no recognition by the British Government (naturally), and at first only an amused tolerance from the library profession.

Douglas John Foskett

She thought of the library, so shining white and new; the rows and rows of unread books; the bliss of unhurried sojourns there and of going out to a restaurant, alone, to eat.

Maud Hart Lovelace

The three most important documents a free society gives are a birth certificate, a passport and a library card.

As a child, I very much objected to books that tried to teach me something. I just wanted to read for pleasure, and I did. But if a book tried to teach me, I returned it to the library.

In my garden I spend my days, in my library I spend my nights. My interests are divided between my geraniums and my books. With the flower I am in the present; with the book I am in the past.

Alexander Smith

It wasn't until Salt Lake City that I began to be a real addict. I would go down to the library two or three times a week to bring away three or four books each time, without any direction.

Wallace Stegner

Listen what happened to me when I was in the fifth form (ca. 1904), in the drawing lesson. An old-timer in the front row, the one who pinched me the most often, suddenly showed me a sketch on tissue paper, copied from the magazine "Niva": The Smoker. In this pandemonium! Leave me alone. I don't remember very well but this drawing, done not by me but by that fathead, immediately threw me into a rage. It roused a hyena in me. I ran to the library, grabbed that big volume of "Niva" and began to copy the portrait of the composer Rubinstein, fascinated by his crow's-feet and his wrinkles, or by a Greek woman and other illustrations; maybe I improvised some too, I hung them all up in my bedroom..

It is their nature, beautiful and simple. That you would destroy such beings, Mr. Lincoln, such superior creatures, seems madness to me. That you speak of them with such reverence, Mr. Poe, seems madness to me. "Can you imagine it? Can you imagine seeing the universe through such eyes? Laughing in the face of time and death—the world your Garden of Eden? Your library? Your harem?

Seth Grahame-Smith

I read Wuthering Heights when I was seven. I stole a copy from the library. We weren't allowed books in the house because they're 'dirty and dusty'. My mum had a shelf of fake leather books which my dad used to hide whisky behind. I used to die of embarrassment every time a visitor tried to pick up a book and realized it was fake.
The library was forbidden so it became exotic and sexy in my imagination. I was dying to get in there and read a book!

The shelves of books we haven't written, like those of books we haven't read, stretches out into the darkness of the universal library's farthest space. We are always at the beginning of the beginning of the letter A.

Alberto Manguel

Flirtation is a circulating library, in which we seldom ask twice for the same volume.

Nathaniel Parker Willis