476 Quotes About Libraries

Once, in the morning, I decided I would be a biologist, and spent hours in the library studying, preparing for my amazing career. I told the librarian, who still smiles at me. She must think I will get out of this place and make it one day. One book I found about organisms was so fascinating I sat down with it in the stacks, engrossed. It took me fifteen minutes to realise it was about orgasms. I read until lunch and then hid the book on the shelf.

Who’s to say what a ‘literary life’ is? As long as you are writing often, and writing well, you don’t need to be hanging-out in libraries all the time. Nightclubs are great literary research centers. So is Ibiza!

Society was the only threat to the sanctity of selfhood: an unpatroned library was an orderly library.

Ah college years, those were the days. Pure freedom ... leaving home for the first time…the parties…”"What about the tutorials, the lectures, the large building with all the books called the ‘library’?”“Is that what those were?” Gerry blithely replied.

Does [a book] inform? Not at all. One must go to it, one must make an effort. It gives one the means to inform oneself.

I loved wandering around the bookshelves, scanning the spines until something happened to catch my eye. Those visits were dreamy, frictionless interludes that promised I would leave richer than I arrived. It wasn't like going to a store with my mom, which guaranteed a tug-of-war between what I wanted and what my mother was willing to buy me; in the library I could have anything I wanted.

You can get lost in any library, no matter the size. But the more lost you are, the more things you'll find.

There was the smell of old books, a smell that has a way of making all libraries seem the same. Some say that smell is asbestos.

A book is read one page at a time. A shelf is read one book at a time. A library is read one shelf at a time.