476 Quotes About Libraries

For Umberto Eco, the ideal library was humane and lighthearted, a place where two students could sit on a couch in the afternoon and, without doing anything too indecent, ‘enjoy the continuation of their flirtation in the library as they take down or replace some books of scientific interest from their shelves’.

I wanted fo have my books around me, forming a totem pole of the narratives I'd visited.

I wanted to have my books around me, forming a totem pole of the narratives I'd visited.

German poet Heinrich Heine [warned], 'There where one burns books, one in the end burns men.

As historian Albert L. Hurtado wrote, "War, pestilence, and famine blow books around the planet like so many hostages to uncertain fortune. Thieves steal, vandals deface, pious clergy burn, and worms eat books. Whether threatened by worms or war, there is nothing permanent about books and libraries.

And besides, libraries aren't just about books. They are one of the few public spaces we have left which don't like our wallets more than us.

Inside was a library unlike any Leni had ever seen. Row upon row of wooden desks, decorated with green banker's lamps, were positioned beneath an arched ceiling. Gothic chandeliers hung above the desks. And the books! She'd never seen so many. They whispered to her of unexplored worlds and unmet friends and she realized that she wasn't alone in this new world. Her friends were here, spine out, waiting for her as they always had.

When nightfall weaves its way through the New York Public Library, it is nothing shy of magic. Long stretched of sunlight on marble morph from white to yellow to pink to orange to red, the dim slowly, completely. Shadows yawn and stretch awake. Eighty-five miles of books on shelves blink away their daytime sleep, for book are often nocturnal creatures, ready to play. To roam. To hunt.

Sometimes it's harder to notice a place you think you know well; you eyes glide over it, seeing it but not seeing it at all. It's almost as if familiarity gives you a kind of temporary blindness. I had to force myself to look harder and try to see beyond the concept of library that was so latent in my brain.