Libraries have long been cherished as sanctuaries of knowledge, inspiration, and discovery. Whether you’re an avid reader, a student, or simply someone who values the power of words, the right quote can ignite your passion and deepen your appreciation for these treasured spaces. In this collection, we’ve gathered 118 inspirational library quotes that celebrate the wisdom, magic, and endless possibilities found within the walls of libraries around the world. Dive in and let these words inspire your next visit or reading adventure.
1. “An ordinary man can surround himself with two thousand books and thenceforward have at least one place in the world in which it is always possible to be happy.” - Augustine Birrell
2. “I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! -- When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.” - Jane Austen
3. “The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait."(About Books; Recoiling, Rereading, Retelling, New York Times, February 22, 1987)” - Anatole Broyard
4. “A public library is the most democratic thing in the world. What can be found there has undone dictators and tyrants: demagogues can persecute writers and tell them what to write as much as they like, but they cannot vanish what has been written in the past, though they try often enough...People who love literature have at least part of their minds immune from indoctrination. If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.” - Doris Lessing
5. “Me, poor man, my libraryWas dukedom large enough.” - William Shakespeare
6. “Few pleasures, for the true reader, rival the pleasure of browsing unhurriedly among books: old books, new books, library books, other people's books, one's own books - it does not matter whose or where. Simply to be among books, glancing at one here, reading a page from one over there, enjoying them all as objects to be touched, looked at, even smelt, is a deep satisfaction. And often, very often, while browsing haphazardly, looking for nothing in particular, you pick up a volume that suddenly excites you, and you know that this one of all the others you must read. Those are great moments - and the books we come across like that are often the most memorable.” - Aidan Chambers
7. “If your library is not "unsafe," it probably isn't doing its job.” - John Berry
8. “Perhaps no place in any community is so totally democratic as the town library. The only entrance requirement is interest.” - Lady Bird Johnson
9. “Th' first thing to have in a libry is a shelf.Fr'm time to time this can be decorated with lithrachure.But th' shelf is th' main thing.” - Finley Peter Dunne
10. “That perfect tranquility of life, which is nowhere to be found but in retreat, a faithful friend and a good library.” - Aphra Behn
11. “I attempted briefly to consecrate myself in the public library, believing every crack in my soul could be chinked with a book.” - Barbara Kingsolver
12. “Imagine the people who believe such things and who are not ashamed to ignore, totally, all the patient findings of thinking minds through all the centuries since the Bible was written. And it is these ignorant people, the most uneducated, the most unimaginative, the most unthinking among us, who would make themselves the guides and leaders of us all; who would force their feeble and childish beliefs on us; who would invade our schools and libraries and homes. I personally resent it bitterly.” - Isaac Asimov
13. “I received the fundamentals of my education in school, but that was not enough. My real education, the superstructure, the details, the true architecture, I got out of the public library. For an impoverished child whose family could not afford to buy books, the library was the open door to wonder and achievement, and I can never be sufficiently grateful that I had the wit to charge through that door and make the most of it. Now, when I read constantly about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that the door is closing and that American society has found one more way to destroy itself.” - Isaac Asimov
14. “I have always had a special affinity for libraries and librarians, for the most obvious reasons. I love books. (One of my first Jobs was shelving books at a branch of the Chicago Public Library.) Libraries are a pillar of any society. I believe our lack of attention to funding and caring for them properly in the United States has a direct bearing on problems of literacy, productivity, and our inability to compete in today's world. Libraries are everyman's free university.” - John Jakes
15. “Libraries, whether my own or shared with a greater reading public, have always seemed to me pleasantly mad places, and for as long as I can remember I've been seduced by their labyrinthine logic, which suggests that reason (if not art) rules over a cacophonous arrangement of books.” - Alberto Manguel
16. “But at night, when the library lamps are lit, the outside world disappears and nothing but the space of books remains in existence. ” - Alberto Manguel
17. “In the dark, with the windows lit and the rows of books glittering, the library is a closed space, a universe of self-serving rules that pretend to replace or translate those of the shapeless universe beyond. ” - Alberto Manguel
18. “During the day, the library is a realm of order.” - Alberto Manguel
19. “If the library in the morning suggests an echo of the severe and reasonable wishful order of the world, the library at night seems to rejoice in the world's essential, joyful muddle. ” - Alberto Manguel
20. “I like to imagine that, on the day after my last, my library and I will crumble together, so that even when I am no more I'll still be with my books.” - Alberto Manguel
21. “Entering a library, I am always stuck by the way in which a certain vision of the world is imposed upon the reader through its categories and its order.” - Alberto Manguel
22. “A library is an ever-growing entity; it multiples seemingly unaided, it reproduces itself by purchase, theft, borrowings, gifts, by suggesting gaps through association, by demanding completion of sorts.” - Alberto Manguel
23. “In a library, no empty shelf remains empty for long.” - Alberto Manguel
24. “If every library is in some sense a reflection of its readers, it is also an image of that which we are not, and cannot be.” - Alberto Manguel
25. “The weight of absence is as much a feature of any library as the constriction of order and space.” - Alberto Manguel
26. “Digestion of words as well; I often read aloud to myself in my writing corner in the library, where no one can hear me, for the sake of better savouring the text, so as to make it all the more mine.” - Alberto Manguel
27. “It has long been my belief that everyone's library contains an Odd Shelf. On this shelf rests a small, mysterious corpus of volumes whose subject matter is completely unrelated to the rest of the library, yet which, upon closer inspection, reveals a good deal about its owner.” - Anne Fadiman
28. “I like to imagine that library school was started because of some sort of silly bar bet where a guy got really plastered and told his buddy that he could convince people that librarians needed to be trained in the art of librarianship. Sadly, this is not the case; its roots are a bit more academic.” - Scott Douglas
29. “...killing rats wasn’t in my job description.” - Scott Douglas
30. “The loudest elderly women always had the quietest elderly husbands.” - Scott Douglas
31. “A library was nothing without its people. You say library and there’s this iconoclastic image of an old-lady librarian telling people to be quiet and not to run. But the thing was, that lady—that iconoclastic lady—was with us when we cleaned. She wore blue jeans, too. Maybe she was what people thought about when you said library, but she didn’t make the library. People made the library. That’s what made a library. Without them, all the sacredness was gone. It was just a building with books.” - Scott Douglas
32. “It was good to walk into a library again; it smelled like home.” - Elizabeth Kostova
33. “When I open them, most of the books have the smell of an earlier time leaking out between the pages - a special odor of the knowledge and emotions that for ages have been calmly resting between the covers. Breathing it in, I glance through a few pages before returning each book to its shelf.” - Haruki Murakami
34. “[D]on't ever apologise to an author for buying something in paperback, or taking it out from a library (that's what they're there for. Use your library). Don't apologise to this author for buying books second hand, or getting them from bookcrossing or borrowing a friend's copy. What's important to me is that people read the books and enjoy them, and that, at some point in there, the book was bought by someone. And that people who like things, tell other people. The most important thing is that people read...” - Neil Gaiman
35. “The public library is where place and possibility meet.” - Stuart Dybek
36. “If television's a babysitter, the Internet is a drunk librarian who won't shut up.” - Dorothy Gambrell
37. “His library was a fine dark place bricked with books, so anything could happen there and always did. All you had to do was pull a book from the shelf and open it and suddenly the darkness was not so dark anymore.” - Ray Bradbury
38. “She'd always been a little excitable, a little more passionate about books than your average person, but she was supposed to be -- she was a librarian, after all.” - Sarah Beth Durst
39. “What in the world would we do without our libraries?” - Katharine Hepburn
40. “They say that Caliph Omar, when consulted about what had to be done with the library of Alexandria, answered as follows: 'If the books of this library contain matters opposed to the Koran, they are bad and must be burned. If they contain only the doctrine of the Koran, burn them anyway, for they are superfluous.' Our learned men have cited this reasoning as the height of absurdity. However, suppose Gregory the Great was there instead of Omar and the Gospel instead of the Koran. The library would still have been burned, and that might well have been the finest moment in the life of this illustrious pontiff.” - Jean Jacques Rousseau
41. “Bibliothèque Nationale. Ich sitze und lese einen Dichter. Es sind viele Leute im Saal, aber man spürt sie nicht. Sie sind in den Büchern. Manchmal bewegen sie sich in den Blättern, wie Menschen, die schlafen und sich umwenden zwischen zwei Träumen.” - Rainer Maria Rilke
42. “Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.” - Virginia Woolf
43. “I grew up in a utopia, I did. California when I was a child was a child's paradise, I was healthy, well fed, well clothed, well housed. I went to school and there were libraries with all the world in them and after school I played in orange groves and in Little League and in the band and down at the beach and every day was an adventure. . . . I grew up in utopia.” - Kim Stanley Robinson
44. “A university is just a group of buildings gathered around a library.” - Shelby Foote
45. “The library was a little old shabby place. Francie thought it was beautiful. The feeling she had about it was as good as the feeling she had about church. She pushed open the door and went in. She liked the combined smell of worn leather bindings, library past and freshly inked stamping pads better than she liked the smell of burning incense at high mass.” - Betty Smith
46. “A library doesn't need windows. A library is a window.” - Stewart Brand
47. “Libraries can in general be too narrow or too wide for the soul.” - Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
48. “But to her, libraries were like hotels: secret villages inhabited by passing strangers from a thousand different worlds brought together just for a few hours.” - Simon Montefiore
49. “A library is like an island in the middle of a vast sea of ignorance, particularly if the library is very tall and the surrounding area has been flooded.” - Daniel Handler
50. “Doctor Who: You want weapons? We're in a library. Books are the best weapon in the world. This room's the greatest arsenal we could have. Arm yourself!(from Tooth and Claw in Season 2)” - Russell T. Davies
51. “Come with me,' Mom says.To the library. Books and summertimego together.” - Lisa Schroeder
52. “We'll always need printed books that don't mutate the way digital books do; we'll always need places to display books, auditoriums for book talks, circles for story time; we'll always need brick-and-mortar libraries.” - Marilyn Johnson
53. “First paycheck I get, I thought, I'm going to get myself a room near the downtown L.A. Public Library.” - Charles Bukowski
54. “Libraries raised me.” - Ray Bradbury
55. “The only thing that you absolutely have to know, is the location of the library.” - Albert Einstein
56. “Until one morning, one of the coldest mornings of the year, when I came in with the book cart and found Jean Hollis Clark, a fellow librarian, standing dead still in the middle of the staff room."I heard a noise from the drop box," Jean said."What kind of noise?""I think it's an animal.""A what?""An animal," Jean said. "I think there's an animal in the drop box."That was when I heard it, a low rumble from under the metal cover. It didn't sound like an animal. It sounded like an old man clearing his throat.Gurr-gug-gug. Gurr-gug-gug.But the opening at the top of the chute was only a few inches wide, so that would be quite a squeeze for an old man. It had to be an animal. But what kind? I got down on my knees, reached over the lid, and hoped for a chipmunk.What I got instead was a blast of freezing air. The night before, the temperature had reached minus fifteen degrees, and that didn't take into account the wind, which cut under your coat and squeezed your bones. And on that night, of all nights, someone had jammed a book into return slot, wedging it open. It was as cold in the box as it was outside, maybe colder, since the box was lined with metal. It was the kind of cold that made it almost painful to breathe.I was still catching my breath, in fact, when I saw the kitten huddled in the front left corner of the box. It was tucked up in a little space underneath a book, so all I could see at first was its head. It looked grey in the shadows, almost like a little rock, and I could tell its fur was dirty and tangled. Carefully, I lifted the book. The kitten looked up at me, slowly and sadly, and for a second I looked straight into its huge golden eyes. The it lowered its head and sank back down into its hole.At that moment, I lost every bone in my body and just melted.” - Vicki Myron
57. “Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market alow you to put there.” - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
58. “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
59. “The old man was peering intently at the shelves. 'I'll have to admit that he's a very competent scholar.'Isn't he just a librarian?' Garion asked, 'somebody who looks after books?'That's where all the rest of scholarship starts, Garion. All the books in the world won't help you if they're just piled up in a heap.” - David Eddings
60. “Some people write letters, in the library.” - Margaret Atwood
61. “Libraries are the future of reading. When the economy is down, we need to make it easier for people to buy and read books for free, not harder. It is stupid to sacrifice tomorrow’s book buyers for today’s dollars, especially when it’s obvious that the source in question doesn’t have any more dollars to give you.” - Courtney Milan
62. “Joss's ears perked up. He loved libraries. Nowhere else in the world felt so safe and homey. Nowhere else smelled like books and dust and happy solitude quite like a library did.” - Heather Brewer
63. “As soon as I got into the library I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. I got a whiff of the leather on all the old books, a smell that got real strong if you picked one of them up and stuck your nose real close to it when you turned the pages. Then there was the the smell of the cloth that covered the brand-new books, books that made a splitting sound when you opened them. Then I could sniff the the paper, that soft, powdery, drowsy smell that comes off the page in little puffs when you're reading something or looking at some pictures, kind of hypnotizing smell.I think it's the smell that makes so many folks fall asleep in the library. You'll see someone turn a page and you can imagine a puff of page powder coming up real slow and easy until it starts piling on a person's eyelashes, weighing their eyes down so much they stay down a little longer after each blink and finally making them so heavy that they just don't come back up at all. Then their mouths open and their heads start bouncing up and down like they're bobbing in a big tub of of water for apples and before you know it... they're out cold and their face thunks smack-dab on the book.That's the part that makes librarians the maddest. They get real upset if folks start drooling in the books” - Christopher Paul Curtis
64. “Betsy returned to her chair, took off her coat and hat, opened her book and forgot the world again.” - Maud Hart Lovelace
65. “The porter spends his days in the Library keeping strict vigil over this catacomb of books, passing along between the shelves and yet never paying heed to the almost audible susurrus of desire- the desire every book has to be taken down and read, to live, to come into being in somebody's mind. He even hands the volumes over the counter, seeks them out in their proper places or returns them there without once realising that a Book is a Person and not a Thing.” - W.N.P. Barbellion
66. “He went through rooms he named as he discovered them, and which he hardly had time to appreciate before he'd flung open a door at the far end and plunged through. . . . and in the Library of All the Same Book he actually stopped to examine a few of the volumes, all titled Various, that lined the shelves.” - Chris Adrian
67. “When rivers flooded, when fire fell from the sky, what a fine place the library was, the many rooms, the books. With luck, no one found you. How could they!--when you were off to Tanganyika in '98, Cairo in 1812, Florence in 1492!?” - Ray Bradbury
68. “Twas a cold Yuletide evening, and I wandered the stacks, shelving multiple titles that the patrons brought back. We toiled overtime at our library here, 'cause the powers that be cut our staffing this year.” - David Davis
69. “They spent pork-barrel money like a tidal-wave sea, but no funds trickled down far enough to reach me. Our books numbered few and were falling apart, and I sat mending pages with a crestfallen heart.” - David Davis
70. “How can you be nervous? Don't you see? We're in a library.” - Eilis O'Neal
71. “A library in the middle of a community is a cross between an emergency exit, a life-raft and a festival. They are cathedrals of the mind; hospitals of the soul; theme parks of the imagination. On a cold rainy island, they are the only sheltered public spaces where you are not a consumer, but a citizen instead” - Caitlin Moran
72. “Rzeczywiście, często się zdarza, że idzie się do biblioteki, bo chce się książkę o znanym tytule, ale główną funkcją biblioteki, a przynajmniej funkcją biblioteki w moim domu i w domach wszystkich znajomych, jakich możemy odwiedzać, jest odkrywanie książek, których istnienia się nie podejrzewało, a które, jak się okazuje, są dla nas niezwykle ważne.” - Umberto Eco
73. “Every girl who aspires ultimately to outfit her own home should assemble a library on architectural styles and on furniture both traditional and modern. As few brides can buy expensively illustrated volumes and household equipment simultaneously, a girl should begin asking parents for books early in life, probably while still in the primary grades...” - Johnson O'Connor
74. “Paradise will be a kind of library” - Jorge Luis Borges
75. “The record store was a place of escape. It was a library and a clubhouse” - Cameron Crowe quoted” - Gary Calamar
76. “There’s a vast fraternity of record collectors, and the record store was their hub. There was not a lot of information on these groups or the labels so you’d gather [there] and it would be like a library. - Lenny Kaye quoted” - Gary Calamar
77. “Leaving behind the babble of the plaza, I enter the Library. I feel, almost physically, the gravitation of the books, the enveloping serenity of order, time magically dessicated and preserved.” - Jorge Luis Borges
78. “He snatched the book from me and replaced it hastily on its shelf, muttering that if one brick was removed the whole library was liable to collapse.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald
79. “The library is not, as some would have it, a place for the retiring of disposition or faint of heart. It is not an ivory tower or a quiet room in a sanitarium facing away from the afternoon sun. It is, rather, a command center, a power base. A board room, a war room. An Oval Office for all who preside over their own destinies. One does not retreat from the world here; one prepares to join it at an advantage.” - Eric Burns
80. “Because that's what Hermione does,' said Ron, shrugging. 'When in doubt, go to the library.” - J.K. Rowling
81. “The Bibliotheque du Roi then gives you the closest thing that currently exists to God's understanding of the world.""And yet with a bigger library we could come ever so much closer.” - Neal Stephenson
82. “Public libraries are the sole community centers left in America. The degree to which a branch of the local library is connected to the larger culture is a reflection of the degree to which the community itself is connected to the larger culture.” - Russell Banks
83. “I have loved this disaster of a library since I was old enough to read.” - Eleanor Brown
84. “Você constrói mil castelos, mil santuários, você não é nada; você constrói uma biblioteca, você é tudo” - Mehmet Murat ildan
85. “A good library is a place, a palace where the lofty spirits of all nations and generations meet.” - Samuel Niger
86. “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.” - E.A. Bucchianeri
87. “Részvétet éreztem az ismeretlen sportember iránt, és egyúttal kárörömet is. Úgy kell neki, miért sportember, de ha már sportember, mit keres minálunk. Valószínűleg ő is így érzett volna irányomban, ha a golfpályán látott volna meg engem.” - Antal Szerb
88. “It's like a sealed, forgotten chamber in me; I shan't feel complete until I've discovered its entrance.' 'Sounds like a tomb. Aren't you afraid of what you'll find in there?' 'It's a library; only the stupid and the evil are afraid of those.” - Iain Banks
89. “He was rather clumsy and shy and looked as if he'd spent the last ten years of his life locked up in a library - hardly the kind of man any girl your age dreams of ...” - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
90. “It was four o'clock of a stickily wet Saturday. As long as it is anything from Monday to Friday the average library attendant goes around thanking her stars she isn't a school-teacher; but the last day of the week, when the rest of the world is having its relaxing Saturday off and coming to gloat over you as it acquires its Sunday-reading best seller, if you work in a library you begin just at noon to wish devoutly that you'd taken up scrubbing-by-the-day, or hack-driving, or porch-climbing or- anything on earth that gave you a weekly half-holiday!” - Margaret Widdemer
91. “I won't be sad too often,If they bury me in the libraryWith bookworms in my coffin.” - J. Patrick Lewis
92. “PAPER TOWERSThe library was on the second floor of the House, not far from my room. It had two floors—the first held the majority of the books and a balcony wrapped in a wrought-iron railing held another set. It was a cavalcade of tomes, all in immaculate rows, and with study carrels and tables thrown in for good measure. It was my home away from home(away from home.I walked inside and paused for a moment to breathe in the scent of paper and dust—the perfumes of knowledge. The library was empty of patrons as far as I could tell, but I could hear the rhythmic squeal of a library cart somewhere in the rows. I followed them down until I found the dark-haired vampire shelving books with mechanical precision. I knew him only as “the librarian.” He was a fount of information, and he had a penchant for leaving books outside my door.” - Chloe Neill
93. “Πατρίδα είναι το μέρος όπου έχει κανείς τα βιβλία του.” - Πάτρικ Λη Φέρμορ
94. “Some books you never get over, like a first love. Some books that made an enormous impression on you when you were young you are afraid to read again years later, like being sorry you met that former love for coffee, because you couldn’t see what you once saw. But there are those few books that can still move you in the old, throbbing way.""How I got over” - Darryl Pinckney
95. “John Armato, a Public relations executive, cherishes his growing Library of Candidates. When people ask him if he's actually read all those books, he asks them if they've actually eaten all the food in their kitchen. "It is good to put up a supply of books; it increases the odds that you'll have what you want when you're hungry for it," he says” - Steve Leveen
96. “My library is an archive of longings.” - Susan Sontag
97. “Who wants a library full of books you've already read?” - Harlan Ellison
98. “There is something nice about a library, isn't there?" Mr. Curtis said. He nodded and took in the familiar scenery. "The scent of ink and worn, dusty pages.” - Ilana Waters
99. “A library could show you everything if you knew where to look.” - Pat Conroy
100. “Zander was always sneaking off to the library to get more books ... Guy would read anything. Said books were more interesting than people.” - Justin Cronin
101. “She took particular comfort in certain familiar sights and sounds that marked her day: the buzz of the fluorescent lights, the pale figures sprawled silent and motionless over their reading, the reassuring feel of her book cart as she wheeled it down the aisle, and the books themselves, symbols of order on their backs - young adulthood reduced to "YA," mystery reduced to a tiny red skull.” - T.E.D. Klein
102. “In the houses of the humble a little library in my opinion is a most precious possession.” - John Bright
103. “And every book, you find, has its own social group--friends of its own it wants to introduce you to, like a party in the library that need never, ever end.” - Caitlin Moran
104. “I have often thought that nothing would do more extensive good at small expense than the establishment of a small circulating library in every county, to consist of a few well-chosen books, to be lent to the people of the country under regulations as would secure their safe return in due time.” - Thomas Jefferson
105. “It is fascinating that Baghdad had more than 100 public libraries in the year 891, Cordoba had 70 public libraries at the end of 10th century, while the royal library of Caliph al-‘Aziz, in the year 988, of the Fatimids in Cairo perhaps had more than 100,000 volumes collection arranged in classified order.” - Balqis Suja'
106. “For one crazy moment he had the notion of a vanished tribe of librarians, lost in the deep underground caverns of the Bodleian, a wild and savage tribe that fed on unwary travellers.” - Lavie Tidhar
107. “Orphan could no longer hear or see the shadows of the dead. He didn't think they had perished. Most likely they were hiding now, somewhere in this landscape of books.” - Lavie Tidhar
108. “She'd absolutely adored the library-an entire building where anyone could take things they didn't own and feel no remorse about it.” - Ally Carter
109. “I know exactly what I would do with immortality: I would read every book in the library.” - Mark Jason Dominus
110. “Library-denigrators, pay heed: suggesting that the Internet is a viable substitute for libraries is like saying porn could replace your wife.” - Joanne Harris
111. “To know your way round a library is to master the whole of culture, i.e. the whole world.” - Sophie Divry
112. “A library implies an act of faith which generations, still in darkness hid, sign in their night in witness of the dawn."À qui la faute? (1872)” - Victor Hugo
113. “She sighed and looked at him sympathetically. 'Cool flame tricks aside, there's no competition.'He lifted his eyebrow. 'Library wins?''Every single time.” - Elizabeth Hunter
114. “I cannot sufficiently celebrate the glorious liberty that reigns in the public libraries of the twentieth century as compared with the intolerable management of those of the nineteenth century, in which the books were jealously railed away from the people, and obtainable only at an expenditure of time and red tape calculated to discourage any ordinary taste for literature.” - Edward Bellamy
115. “Sam hauled open the library door."There you are!" Whit pushed up from the desk he'd been hunched over. "We thought you two had given up on us.""Unlike some people I know," I said, removing my mittens and scarf, "we don't live here.""She says that now." Sam followed me toward Whit's and Orrin's desks, where they worked over flat electronic screens. "But the first thing she said when I showed her the library was that we should move in."Orrin lifted an eyebrow, oddly delicate for someone so large. "The acoustics would be terrible.” - Jodi Meadows
116. “The library had become her solace. Her refuge.Books did not question or judge. They made safe companions.” - Inglath Cooper
117. “An even more pointed example of the the power of the silence tabu in libraries occurred in Duluth in 1981. The police were pursuing a fugitive from justice who ran into the public library. Uniformed police surrounded the building, and the library director was notified that only unobtrusive plainclothesmen were entering the building. Their instructions: “When you find him, overpower him. Quietly.” It was done, and only a few people in the crowded building saw a handcuffed man being ushered past the checkout counter. “See,” one librarian remarked quietly to an amazed person, “that’s what happens when you don’t pay your book fines.” - Ray B. Browne
118. “If peace had a smell,it would be the smell of a library full of old, leather-bound books.” - Mark Pryor
