I was a hugely unchaperoned reader, and I would wander into my local public library and there sat the world, waiting for me to look at it, to find out about it, to discover who I might be inside it."[Patrick Ness slams library cuts (The Guardian, 23 June 2011)]

Librarians are tour-guides for all of knowledge.

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

They open up the world. Because knowledge is useless if you don’t know how to find it, if you don’t even know where to begin to look. - on librarians

Libraries are not facing crisis, they are in crisis.

There's so much proscription in the lives of young people, and it's so vital to have a place that says, look, here are the doors onto the world and amazingly, you're free to choose any one you like. - Patrick Ness on Libraries

villages grew into towns, towns into cities. And people began to live on the earth rather than within it.