Quotes About Libraries

I had a mother who walked to the library with me, and you can't walk to a lot of libraries in San Antonio because - guess what? - there are no sidewalks, except in the neighborhoods. And they're across big boulevards, and it's so hot, you can't even walk to the corner. So things like that affect how children can get to libraries. So there are a lot of things involved.

There is something about libraries, old libraries, that makes them seem almost sacred. There's a smell of paper and must and binding stuff. It's like all the books are fighting against decay, against turning into dust, and at the same time fighting for attention.

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.

If, as I anticipate, a wide array of personal, portable information/communication devices becomes increasingly important and widespread for information-intensive users, it will be a major challenge for libraries to adapt their content and services to such a diverse technological environment.

It may be primarily property taxes in the case of a public library, or state taxes and tuition in the case of an academic library at a public university, but the funding sources of most libraries continue to have a strong geographic component.

It happens to us once or twice in a lifetime to be drunk with some book which probably has some extraordinary relative power to intoxicate us and none other; and having exhausted that cup of enchantment we go groping in libraries all our years afterwards in the hope of being in Paradise again.

The only people who have never had a problem with me speaking in their venues are independent bookstores and libraries. Universities and humanities councils have canceled me, but never an independent bookstore.

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.

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.

A lot of my travel is at least partly work, visiting schools and libraries, especially in France.

There are many ways of discarding [books]. You can give them to friends,--or enemies,--or to associations or to poor Southern libraries. But the surest way is to lend them. Then they never come back to bother you.

... bums on the outside, libraries inside.

Books and bottles breed generosity, and the bibliophile and the oenophile og through life scattering largesse from their libraries and cellars

The retreat and disappearance of glaciers—there are only 160,000 left—means we're burning libraries and damaging the planet, possibly beyond repair. Bit by bit, glacier by glacier, rib by rib, we're living the Fall.

Record stores are the hippest libraries. In these tired ole days of homogenized entertainment, where so much of the art of our society is culminated, dumbed-down and mass produced, there is a shining jewel in the rise of the indy record stores. Going to a record shop for me is like a little treasure hunt no one can take you on but yourself. It's fun to look around and see the other shoppers too...totally entrenched in their own adventure, anticipating the reward of heart wrenching, soul filling, joy making music that might just be a bin or a flip away.

The three of them set out every morning on adventures of their own kind. Once, an elderly professor of literature, Mrs. Taggart's friend, saw them on top of a pile in a junk yard, dismantling the carcass of an automobile. He stopped, shook his head and said to Francisco, 'A young man of your position ought to spend his time in libraries, absorbing the culture of the world.' 'What do you think I'm doing?' asked Francisco.

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.

I think that it's not enough to do the little Band-Aid things of having celebrities come and read to children. Not that we don't need to read to children, but we don't need to just do it one time and feel good about it. I think we need to think long range about poor people and their relationship to libraries.

If information is the currency of democracy, then libraries are its banks.

Every comedian is furious. Age makes me angry. I'm unhappy at not being able to open packages anymore. I'm angry that libraries have gone. I hate children on planes. I'm very shallow, so they tend to be little things. To be honest, I think I was probably angry the day I was born, you know, about diapers or something.

Libraries have always been there for me. Of course I'll stand up for them!

Freedom is found through the portals of our nation's libraries.

How little our libraries cost us as compared with our liquor cellars.

Just as we outgrow a pair of trousers, we outgrow acquaintances, libraries, principles, etc., at times before they're worn out and times - and this is the worst of all - before we have new ones.

Because nearly all digital libraries are tied to bricks-and-mortar institutions, the funding base tends to be quite localized.

Shout for libraries. Shout for the young readers who use them.

Going to the Huntington gardens and libraries was radically important for me. They have one of the best collections of 18th- and 19th-century British portraiture that you can imagine in Southern California. One doesn't think about Southern California as being the capital of great art.

I took anatomy classes. I went to medical libraries and talked to doctors and nutritionists. I did the whole thing before using myself as a human guinea pig.

Cloisters, ancient libraries ... I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.

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.

Libraries are as the shrine where all the relics of the ancient saints, full of true virtue, and that without delusion or imposture, are preserved and reposed.

The art of reading is to skip judiciously. Whole libraries may be skipped in these days, when we have the results of them in our modern culture without going over the ground again.

I am a bookworm. For play, I bury myself in the corners of libraries and read.

Spies go to bars for the same reason people go to libraries: full of information if you know where to ask.

Accessible local libraries are vital to communities and to children.

I cannot sufficiently celebrate the glorious liberty that reigns in the public libraries of the twentieth century as compared with the intolerable management of those of the nineteenth century, in which the books were jealously railed away from the people, and obtainable only at an expenditure of time and red tape calculated to discourage any ordinary taste for literature.

Great books are written for Christianity much oftener than great deeds are done for it. City libraries tell us of the reign of Jesus Christ but city streets tell us of the reign of Satan.

There were two free public libraries within walking distance of my home; I remember taking six books home from every visit, the limit set by the library.

Libraries: Here is where people, one frequently finds, lower their voices, and raise their minds.

Blessed is he who invented recording! But what a pity that he was not born centuries earlier! Think only of all that we would be able to hear and therefore understand better. Oh, the unending research in libraries and museums, the readings and collations of texts, the maddening desire to know the truth!