Fiction can show you a different world. It can take you somewhere you've never been. Once you've visited other worlds, like those who ate fairy fruit, you can never be entirely content with the world that you grew up in. Discontent is a good thing: discontented people can modify and improve their worlds, leave them better, leave them different.

The boy was a model pupil, forgettable and easily forgotten, and he sent much of his spare time in the back of the English class where there were shelves of old paperbacks, and in the school library, a large room filled with books and old armchairs, where he read stories as enthusiastically as some children ate.

Libraries are the thin red line between civilization and barbarism.

If you do not value libraries then you do not value information or culture or wisdom. You are silencing the voices of the past and you are damaging the future.

For me, closing libraries is the equivalent of eating your seed corn to save a little money.

Libraries really are the gates to the future.