476 Quotes About Libraries

...it's appalling to remember that the entire Oxford University Library was sold for scrap in the mid-1500s. Nor was that situation unique to Oxford, as libraries were deconstructed throughout the land.

The first sentence of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s that reached me still jolts me every time I run into it. “Meek young men,” he wrote in “The American Scholar,” “grow up in libraries believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote those books…

We always hit the bookstores & libraries in every city and small town, and I learned to tell a lot about a place by the kinds of books that were carried, or the attention given a library. The best I had ever seen was in NYC. The worst in Paoli, Indiana.

Inside public libraries you see the people, programs, problems, and answers that offer a genuine look into the heart and soul of a town.

The once tattered and gloomy public library has moved to a brilliant new building a few streets over, and as I walked around the landscapers installing the brick steps, I caught the sign on the door that said, "Welcome to Your New Library." In the breezeway, three junior high school girls gathered around a computer terminal and giggled. A woman in a purple cardigan greeted me from behind the circulation desk with a smile and thin wave. Seduced by all of it, I thought, I love my new library.

That is to say, 'forget the color line, consider a reader a reader, and cut out other such nonsense.

Third, there was little or no opportunity for professional meetings and contact within the system since the local, state, and regional associations were not open to them for visitation or membership. Fourth, before the opening of the Hampton Institute School of Library Service in 1925, professional library school training for blacks had to be obtained outside the region.

Libraries are the cathedrals of the modern age. All that knowledge, available for anyone to use. It’s quite a subversive thought.

A particularly good book had a way of opening new spaces in one's mind. It even invited you to come back later and rummage through what you'd learned.