Popular quotes about Library! Wisdom and inspiration are here! | page 21
I can think of few more worthy achievements than keeping a library alive and well for a century. As far as I am concerned, one of the absolute backbones of a free society and a democracy is the library offering access to a treasure house of information to all.
Gillian RobertsThey say there is no 'free lunch' in life. But there are free books! I still can't believe I can go to my local library and get just abut any book in the world - and I don't have to pay a dime!! It's amazing! The library is truly the greatest invention of our civilization.
Dan GutmanThe Doctor: Just had a fall. All the way down there, right to the library. Heck of a climb back up. Amelia: You're soaking wet. The Doctor: I was in the swimming pool. Amelia: You said you were in the library. The Doctor: So was the swimming pool.
Steven MoffatI followed the launch of the library with Margaret Atwood and then David Mitchell. I just sat quietly at home secretly envying them. Then just over a month ago she asked me if I would like to be the third author to join the library.
SjonThe time was when a library was very like a museum and the librarian a mouser among dusty books. The time is when the library is a school and the librarian in the highest sense a teacher.
Melvil DeweyHeaven, Kiwi thought, would be the reading room of a great library. But it would be private. Cozy. You wouldn't have to worry about some squeaky-shoed librarian turning the lights off on you or gauging your literacy by reading the names on your book spines, and there wouldn't be a single other patron. The whole place would hum with a library's peace, filtering softly over you like white bars of light.
Karen RussellIt is the interest one takes in books that makes a library. And if a library have interest it is; if not, it isn't.
Carolyn WellsLibraries are absolutely at the center of my life. Since I couldn't afford to go to college, I attended the library three or four days a week from the age of eighteen on, and graduated from the library when I was twenty-eight.
Ray BradburyI received the fundamentals of my education in school, but that was not enough. My real education, the superstructure, the details, the true architecture, I got out of the public library. For an impoverished child whose family could not afford to buy books, the library was the open door to wonder and achievement, and I can never be sufficiently grateful that I had the wit to charge through that door and make the most of it.
Isaac AsimovA library of wisdom, then, is more precious than all wealth, and all things that are desirable cannot be compared to it.
Richard de BuryThe government can now delve into personal and private records of individuals even if they cannot be directly connected to a terrorist or foreign government. Bank records, e-mails, library records, even the track of discount cards at grocery stores can be obtained on individuals without establishing any connection to a terrorist before a judge. According to the Los Angeles Times, Al Qaeda uses sophisticated encryption devices freely available on the Internet that cannot be cracked. So the terrorists are safe from cyber-snooping, but we're not.
Molly IvinsMy childhood library was small enough not to be intimidating. And yet I felt the whole world was contained in those two rooms. I could walk any aisle and smell wisdom.
Rita DoveBetween the kitchen and the destroyed chapel a door led into an oval-shaped library. The space inside seemed safe except for a large hole at portrait level in the far wall, caused by mortar-shell attack on the villa two months earlier. The rest of the room had adapted itself to this wound, accepting the habits of weather, evening stars, the sound of birds.
Michael OndaatjeCram your head with characters and stories. Abuse your library privileges. Never stop looking at the world, and never stop reading to find out what sense other people have made of it. If people give you a hard time and tell you to get your nose out of a book, tell them you're working. Tell them it's research. Tell them to pipe down and leave you alone.
Jennifer WeinerI have always been an obsessive reader - I remember going back and forth to the local library with stacks of books taller than I was.
Lisa KleypasI think people have a tendency to think of a writer as someone who wants to go take a walk, maybe case a library... I think that's great sometimes but we really treat it like Monday through Friday come in early. You're not late for inspiration. You're working through it no matter what is happening even if you're writing a terrible version.
Roberto OrciThe imaginary is not formed in opposition to reality as its denial or compensation; it grows among signs, from book to book, in the interstice of repetitions and commentaries; it is born and takes shape in the interval between books. It is the phenomena of the library.
Michel FoucaultPeople think librarians are unromantic, unimaginative. This is not true. We are people whose dreams run in particular ways. Ask a mountain climber what he feels when he sees a mountain; a lion tamer what goes through his mind when he meets a new lion; a doctor confronted with a beautiful malfunctioning body. The idea of a library full of books, the books full of knowledge, fills me with fear and love and courage and endless wonder.
Elizabeth McCrackenA library is a place where you can lose your innocence without losing your virginity.
Germaine GreerDad claims that library science is the foundation of all sciences just as math is the key -- and we will survive or founder, depending on how well the librarians do their jobs. Librarians didn't look glamorous to me but maybe Dad had hit on a not very obvious truth.
Robert A. HeinleinFor books [Charles Darwin] had no respect, but merely considered them as tools to be worked with. ... he would cut a heavy book in half, to make it more convenient to hold. He used to boast that he had made Lyell publish the second edition of one of his books in two volumes, instead of in one, by telling him how ho had been obliged to cut it in half. ... his library was not ornamental, but was striking from being so evidently a working collection of books.
Francis DarwinOne teacher told me that my work belonged in the trash. That day I ran out of the classroom and ended up in the library, where there happened to be a black and white photography exhibition of Robert Rauschenberg's photographs of the streets of New York. The subject of his photos were exactly what I was painting about.
Jose ParlaI didn't think about being king,โ he said, his voice hoarse. Eddis stared. โYour capacity to land yourself in a mess because you didn't think first, Eugenides, will never cease to amaze me. What do you mean you didn't think about being king? Is Attolia going to marry you and move into my library?
Megan Whalen TurnerThe Bible is actually a library of books-some long, some short- written over hundreds of years by many authors. Behind each one, however, was [the] Author: the Spirit of God.
Billy GrahamOne summer I was homeless in L.A., when I was about fifteen, and I used to go to the library to get books. I would have books in abandoned cars, in the seats, cubby holes on the L.A. River, just to have books wherever I could keep them, I just loved to have books. And that really helped me. I didn't realize it was going to be my destiny; I didn't know I was going to be a writer.
Luis J. RodriguezThe first part of my career was indeed as a performer and recording artist, and I am still keenly involved with both. While rummaging around in the British Library, I found many delightful and interesting compositions by 18th-century men and women composers.
Barbara HarbachThe Bible became the book of books, but it is not one document. It is a mystical library of interwoven texts by unknown authors who wrote and edited at different times with widely divergent aims. This sacred work of so many epochs and so many hands contains some facts of provable history, some stories of unprovable myth, some poetry of soaring beauty, and many passages of unintelligible, perhaps coded, perhaps simply mistranslated, mystery. Most of it is written not to recount events but to promote a higher truthโthe relationship of one people and their God.
Simon Sebag-MontefioreIt's strange, isn't it. You stand in the middle of a library and go aaaaagghhhh' and everyone just stares at you. But you do the same thing on an aeroplane, and everyone joins in.
Tommy CooperNobody recognizes that a bookstore or library can also be a drowning polar bear. And in this country [US], magazines, newspapers, and bookstores are drowning polar bears. And if people can't see that or don't want to talk about it, I don't understand them at all.
Sherman AlexieWill!" Charlotte threw up her hands. "Why didn't you say so?" "You know, the books on demon pox are in the library," Will said with an injured tone. "I wasn't preventing anyone from reading them
Cassandra ClareSo I'm in the library, and I have keyboards out and my headphones out. Everybody's like, "Mike are you making beats right now?" and I'm like, "Yeah... sorry!"
Mike PosnerThere must be every kind of books in your library. The most beautiful gardens are those with many different flowers, with all kinds of herbs and weeds!
Mehmet Murat IldanA library is many things, but particularly it is a place where books live, and where you can get in touch with other people, and other thoughts, through books... Books hold most of the secrets of the world, most of the thoughts that men and women have had.
E. B. WhitePublic libraries are our great teachers and storytellers, and are a vital adjunct to our schools. In this day of standardized and homogenized education, a library offers individual and personalized learning opportunities second to none.
Julie AndrewsI have written 240 books on a wide variety of topics. . . . Some of it I based on education I received in my school, but most of it was backed by other ways of learning - chiefly in the books I obtained in the public library.
Isaac AsimovI feel, holding books, accommodating their weight and breathing their dust, an abiding love. I trust them, in a way that I can't trust my computer, though I couldn't do without it. Books are matter. My books matter. What would I have done through these years without the library and all its lovely books?
Lori LansensThe porter spends his days in the Library keeping strict vigil over this catacomb of books, passing along between the shelves and yet never paying heed to the almost audible susurrus of desire- the desire every book has to be taken down and read, to live, to come into being in somebody's mind. He even hands the volumes over the counter, seeks them out in their proper places or returns them there without once realising that a Book is a Person and not a Thing.
W.N.P. BarbellionThere were two kinds of students who liked the library: those who devoured one book after another and those who savored the same book repeatedly. Now she understood those rereaders differently ... she realized it was not the rereading that led to fresh insights. It was the rereader-- because when a person is changing inside, there are inevitably new things to see.
Rachel SimonFirst time I ever took acid and got really high, as I was walking around I thought "Gee. The world looked like this when I was a little kid." I remember seeing the sparkling reality and three-dimensionality of things. Sort of like a renewal, every time you do it is a renewal, it is a renewal. It keeps your head young. It lets you keep that being able to accept the new thing just as easily as a kid would. Most people get all this stuff in their head like an old library, no room for the new volume to go on the shelves.
Owsley StanleyI am afraid that all the grace that I have got of my comfortable and easy times and happy hours, might almost lie on a penny. But the good that I have received from my sorrows, and pains, and griefs, is altogether incalculable โฆ Affliction is the best bit of furniture in my house. It is the best book in a ministerโs library.
Charles SpurgeonNatural species are the library from which genetic engineers can work. Genetic engineers don't make new genes, they rearrange existing ones. Speaking as World Wildlife Fund Executive Vice President, stating the need to conserve biodiversity, even plants and animals having no immediate use, as a unique repository of genes for possible future biogengineering applications.
Thomas LovejoyIf you want to be a writer, you should go into the largest library you can find and stand there contemplating the books that have been written. Then you should ask yourself, 'Do I really have anything to add?' If you have the arrogance or the humility to say yes, you will know you have the vocation.
Margaret AtwoodA library is a good place to go when you feel bewildered or undecided, for there in a book, you may have your question answered
E. B. White