Library Quotes - Page 15

• Sometimes he spent hours together in the great libraries of Paris, those catacombs of departed authors, rummaging among their hoards of dusty and obsolete works in quest of food for his unhealthy appetite. He was, in a manner, a literary ghoul, feeding in the charnel-house of decayed literature.

  Washington Irving

  Ghouls, Paris, House

  Edgar Allan Poe, Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Sir Walter Scott, Wilhelm Hauff (2011). “The Best Ghost Stories 1800-1849: A Classic Ghost Anthology”, p.16, Bottletree Books LLC

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• County library? Reference desk, please. Hello? Yes, I need a word definition. Well, that's the problem. I don't know how to spell it and I'm not allowed to say it. Could you just rattle off all the swear words you know and I'll stop you when...Hello?

  Bill Watterson

  Needs, Definitions, Hello

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• I despair of ever getting it through anybody's head I am not interested in bookshops, I am interested in what's written in the books. I don't browse in bookshops, I browse in libraries, where you can take a book home and read it, and if you like it you go to a bookshop and buy it.

  Helene Hanff

  Book, Home, Despair

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• She went out and took a last long look at the shabby little library. She knew she would never see it again. Eyes changed after they looked at new things. If in the years to be she were to come back, her new eyes might make everything seem different from the way she saw it now. The way it was now was the way she wanted to remember it.

  Betty Smith

  Eye, Years, Long

  BETTY SMITH (1943). “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn”

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• Still, even without the country or a lake, the summer was a fine thing, particularly when you were at the beginning of it, looking ahead into it. There would be months of beautifully long, empty days, and each other to play with, and the books from the library.

  Edward Eager

  Summer, Country, Book

  Edward Eager, N. M. Bodecker (1999). “Half Magic”, p.2, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Mr. Pewter led them through to a library, filled with thousands of antiquarian books. 'Impressive, eh?' 'Very,' said Jack. 'How did you amass all these?' 'Well,' said Pewter, 'You know the person who always borrows books and never gives them back?' 'Yes...?' 'I'm that person.

  Jasper Fforde

  Book, Giving, Pewter

  Jasper Fforde (2009). “The Big Over Easy: Nursery Crime Adventures 1”, p.74, Hachette UK

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• First paycheck I get, I thought, I'm going to get myself a room near the downtown L.A. Public Library.

  Charles Bukowski

  Downtown, Rooms, Firsts

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• On my first visit to the public library, I was like a kid at a candy store where all the candy was free. I gorged myself until my tummy ached.

  Craig Thompson

  Kids, Firsts, Stores

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• A man may debar nonsense from his library of reason, but not from the arena of his impulses.

  Rex Stout

  Men, May, Arena

  Rex Stout (2010). “The League of Frightened Men”, p.22, Bantam

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• It has always been my experience that, whatever groupings I choose for my books, the space in which I plan to lodge them necessarily reshapes my choice and, more important, in no time proves too small for them and forces me to change my arrangement. In a library, no empty shelf remains empty for long. Like Nature, libraries abhor a vacuum, and the problem of space is inherent in the very nature of any collection of books.

  Alberto Manguel

  Book, Space, Long

  Alberto Manguel (2011). “The Library at Night”, p.65, Vintage Canada

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• Controller Borasus sighed with relief. Libraries were not places of danger. It had to be a hoax.

  Diana Wynne Jones

  Relief, Hoaxes, Danger

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• I used to think that when I grew up there wouldn't be so many rules. Back in elementary school there were rules about what entrance you used in the morning, what door you used going home, when you could talk in the library, how many paper towels you could use in the rest room, and how many drinks of water you could get during recess. And there was always somebody watching to make sure. What I'm finding out about growing older is that there are just as many rules about lots of things, but there's nobody watching.

  Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

  Morning, Home, School

  Phyllis Reynolds Naylor (2012). “Alice in Rapture, Sort Of”, p.66, Simon and Schuster

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• I've got a library copy of Gone with the Wind, a quart of milk and all these cookies. Wow! What an orgy!

  Jacqueline Susann

  Wind, Gone, Cookies

  Jacqueline Susann (2016). “Valley of the Dolls 50th Anniversary Edition”, p.22, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• All knowledge that the world has ever received comes from the mind; the infinite library of the universe is in our own mind.

  Swami Vivekananda

  Inspiration, Practice, Meditation

  Swami Vivekananda (2015). “The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda”, p.34, Manonmani Publishers

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• He kissed me for a long moment, holding my shoulders, perhaps to keep me from pressing my whole body against his. Then he tried to lift my bag. "My God," he said. "What happened?" "I found out one may check out twenty books at a time from the school library.

  Laura Whitcomb

  Book, School, Long

  Laura Whitcomb (2005). “A Certain Slant of Light”, p.138, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• I've read Reverend Kirk, in fact. My uncle's library has quite a few books of your people. I have read Mr. Lang's fairy tales as well. (Katherine Rae O'Flaherty) "Books are not the same as reality," Devlin stared at her. "My world is not always kind to mortals.

  Melissa Marr

  Uncles, Book, Reality

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• The library in summer is the most wonderful thing because there you get books on any subject and read them each for only as long as they hold your interest, abandoning any that don't, halfway or a quarter of the way through if you like, and store up all that knowledge in the happy corners of your mind for your own self and not to show off how much you know or spit it back at your teacher on a test paper.

  Polly Horvath

  Summer, Teacher, Book

  Polly Horvath (2008). “My One Hundred Adventures”, p.10, Schwartz & Wade

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• She closed the book and put her cheek against it. There was still an odor of a library on it, of dust, leather, binding glue, and old paper, one book carrying the smell of hundreds.

  Shannon Hale

  Book, Dust, Smell

  Shannon Hale (2010). “The Goose Girl”, p.262, A&C Black

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• ... bums on the outside, libraries inside.

  Ray Bradbury

  Ray Bradbury (2012). “Fahrenheit 451: A Novel”, p.146, Simon and Schuster

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• Some friends of theirs had rented their house for several months to an interior decorator. When they returned, they discovered that their entire library had been reorganized by color and size. Shortly thereafter, the decorator met with a fatal automobile accident. I confess that when this story was told, everyone around the dinner table concurred that justice had been served.

  Anne Fadiman

  Color, Justice, House

  Anne Fadiman (2011). “Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader”, p.5, Macmillan

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• library is a beautiful old thing

  Elizabeth Gilbert

  Beautiful, Old Things

  Elizabeth Gilbert (2010). “The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims”, p.40, A&C Black

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• It's Will," she said. "He's being absolutely ridiculous in the dining room." Charlotte looked puzzled. "How is this different from him being totally ridiculous in the library or the weapons room or any of the other places he's usually ridiculous?

  Cassandra Clare

  Dining, Different, Weapons

  Cassandra Clare (2013). “The Infernal Devices: Clockwork Angel; Clockwork Prince; Clockwork Princess”, p.160, Simon and Schuster

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• She regarded books as the emblems of secret brotherhood. A man with this sort of library couldn't possibly hurt her.

  Milan Kundera

  Hurt, Book, Men

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• Now, I'm as appreciative as the next obsessive-compulsive recovering-academic of the vast riches of material becoming available online, thanks to all those Google scanners crouched in the basements of libraries around the world, madly feeding books through their machines. I download obscure tomes onto my iPad and give thanks to the dual gods Gates and Jobs, singing hymns to all the lesser pantheon of geniuses. But there's nothing like a book.

  Laurie R. King

  Jobs, Book, Hymns

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• All her knowledge is gone now. Everything she ever learned, or heard, or saw. Her particular way of looking at Hamlet or daisies or thinking about love, all her private intricate thoughts, her inconsequential secret musings – they’re gone too. I heard this expression once: Each time someone dies, a library burns. I’m watching it burn right to the ground.

  Jandy Nelson

  Thinking, Expression, Secret

  Jandy Nelson (2010). “The Sky Is Everywhere”, p.101, Penguin

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