825 Quotes About Library

Over the years I have collected so many books that, in aggregate, they can fairly be called a library.I don't know what percentage of them I have read. Increasingly I wonder how many of them I ever will read. This has done nothing to dampen my pleasure in acquiring more books.

The library was still giving trouble: a few books in some of the more obscure corners of the stacks retained some autonomy, dating back to an infamous early experiment with flying books, and lately they’d begun to breed. Shocked undergraduates had stumbled on books in the very act.

A fig for your precious society with its bridge parties, its inane chatter, its cheap mentality; its dances and vulgar banquets; its snobbery and cheap pretension. The humblest library can show you upon a single shelf better society and far more select company than all the drawing-rooms of Europe, America, and South Africa.

a library shaped by the aspirations and concerns of people who came of age in the late sixties [the collected works of Thoreau, Lopez, Abbey, Ginsberg, Snyder, Kerouac, the entirety of the Foxfire series as well as The Gulag Archipelago, The Tropic of Cancer, a smattering of Gogol, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky, The Rubaiyat, The Sand County Almanac, Them] ["The Basement,” The Awl, Feb 5, 2015].

A library is a place to go for a reality check, a bracing dose of literature, or a "true reflection of our history," whether it's a brick-and-mortar building constructed a century ago or a fanciful arrangement of computer codes. The librarian is the organizer, the animating spirit behind it, and the navigator. Her job is to create order out of the confusion of the past, even as she enables us to blast into the future.

As for reading, I wish I had a magic door to a library where I could go in, read for days and days, and come back in the same minute I left. I'm still looking for the door.

I was born, and then I was quietly resentful of that fact for a few years...but then I went to a library and it was okay.

I will tell everyone I know to come [to the library]. This place saves lives.

Besides, I like libraries. It makes me feel comfortable and secure to have walls of words, beautiful and wise, all around me. I always feel better when I can see that there is something to hold back the shadows.