136 Library Quotes

If there's one place where the world of knowledge converges, it’s the library. Libraries have been the cornerstone of learning, imagination, and discovery for centuries. From the smell of old books to the digital repositories of the modern age, they hold treasures that transcend time and space. In this collection, we’ve gathered 136 of the most inspiring, thought-provoking, and heartwarming library quotes that celebrate these sanctuaries of wisdom. Whether you’re a lifelong library lover or just beginning to appreciate their magic, these quotes will resonate with your love for the written word and the endless pursuit of knowledge.

1. “A library is a place where you can lose your innocence without losing your virginity.” - Germaine Greer

2. “People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.” - Saul Bellow

3. “The three rules of the Librarians of Time and Space are: 1) Silence; 2) Books must be returned no later than the last date shown; and 3) Do not interfere with the nature of causality.” - Terry Pratchett

4. “Don't mark up the Library's copy, you fool! Librarians are Unprankable. They'll track you down! They have skills!” - Charles Ogden

5. “When I got [my] library card, that was when my life began.” - Rita Mae Brown

6. “If your library is not "unsafe," it probably isn't doing its job.” - John Berry

7. “Libraries are reservoirs of strength, grace and wit, reminders of order, calm and continuity, lakes of mental energy, neither warm nor cold, light nor dark ... In any library in the world, I am at home, unselfconscious, still and absorbed."[Still in Melbourne January 1987]” - Germaine Greer

8. “When the going gets tough, the tough get a librarian.” - Joan Bauer

9. “Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors. The library connects us with the insight and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from all our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species. I think the health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all be tested by how well we support our libraries.” - Carl Sagan

10. “In the nonstop tsunami of global information, librarians provide us with floaties and teach us to swim.” - Linton Weeks

11. “[Public] libraries should be open to all—except the censor.[Response to questionnaire in Saturday Review, October 29 1960]” - John F. Kennedy

12. “If this nation is to be wise as well as strong, if we are to achieve our destiny, then we need more new ideas for more wise men reading more good books in more public libraries. These libraries should be open to all—except the censor. We must know all the facts and hear all the alternatives and listen to all the criticisms. Let us welcome controversial books and controversial authors. For the Bill of Rights is the guardian of our security as well as our liberty.[Response to questionnaire in Saturday Review, October 29 1960]” - John F. Kennedy

13. “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

14. “I do not understand people who will lustily throw $40,000 at the shiny red automobile of their choice, but well up with tears and become outraged when they are asked to pay $5 for a damaged videotape. Either they are fucked up and their priorities are fucked up or I am fucked up and my priorities are fucked up. Because I am me, I think it is them.” - Don Borchert

15. “I am convinced that grandkids are inherently evil people who tell their grandparents to "just go to the library and open up an e-mail account - it's free and so simple.” - Scott Douglas

16. “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

17. “In my fool hardy youth, when my friends were dreaming of heroic deeds in the realms of engineering and law, finance and national politics, I dreamt of becoming a librarian. ” - Alberto Manguel

18. “Ultimately, the number of books always exceeds the space they are granted.” - Alberto Manguel

19. “The weight of absence is as much a feature of any library as the constriction of order and space.” - Alberto Manguel

20. “Knowing I lov'd my books, he furnish'd me From mine own library with volumes that I prize above my dukedom.” - William Shakespeare

21. “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.” - Roger Zelazny

22. “Dulcie always found a public library a little upsetting, for one saw so many odd people there.” - Barbara Pym

23. “The library is the worst group of people ever assembled in history. They're mean, conniving, rude, and extremely well-read, which makes them dangerous.” - Leslie Knope

24. “What in the world would we do without our libraries?” - Katharine Hepburn

25. “There were two sets of double doors leading out of the antechamber, one marked STACKS and the other TOMES. Not knowing the difference between the two, I headed to the ones labeled STACKS. That was what I wanted. Stacks of books. Great heaps of books. Shelf after endless shelf of books.” - Patrick Rothfuss

26. “Most people either love or hate old libraries. To some, a room like this--dim, high-ceilinged, dusty, smelling of old paper and crumbling leather--would be oppressive, a place to flee from in search of sun and air. To others, like me, it was a wonderful cave filled with unimaginable treasures and unexpected treats. I always found myself inhaling deeply when I entered the stacks, as if trying to absorb part of them into my bloodstream.” - Sheila Connolly

27. “You must live feverishly in a library. Colleges are not going to do any good unless you are raised and live in a library everyday of your life.” - Ray Bradbury

28. “But the central branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library was still a place of wonders to Tess, even if the book budget had been slashed and the hours cut. Her parents had made a lot of mistakes, a fact Tess compulsively shared on first dates, but she gave them credit for doing one thing right: Starting when she was eight, they gave her a library card and dropped her off at the downtown Pratt every Saturday while they shopped. Twenty-one years later, Tess still entered through the children's entrance on the side, pausing to toss a penny in the algae-coated fish pond, then climbing the stairs to the main hall. If she could be married here, she would.” - Laura Lippman

29. “Should he give free reign to his desires, the bibliomaniac can ruin his life along with the lives of his loved ones. He'll often take better care of his books than of his own health; he'll spend more on fiction than he does on food; he'll be more interested in his library than in his relationships, and, since few people are prepared to live in a place where every available surface is covered with piles of books, he'll often find himself alone, perhaps in the company of a neglected and malnourished cat. When he dies, all but forgotten, his body might fester for days before a curious neighbor grows concerned about the smell.” - Mikita Brottman

30. “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

31. “One of the most subversive institutions in the United States is the public library..” - bell hooks

32. “anyone who’s worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes him, and with extravagant enthusiasm.” - Virginia Woolf

33. “Let us save what remains: not by vaults and locks which fence them from the public eye and use in consigning them to the waste of time, but by such a multiplication of copies, as shall place them beyond the reach of accident.” - Thomas Jefferson

34. “Librarians are the coolest people out there doing the hardest job out there on the frontlines. And every time I get to encounter or work with librarians, I'm always impressed by their sheer awesomeness.” - Neil Gaiman

35. “It's still National Library Week. You should be especially nice to a librarian today, or tomorrow. Sometime this week, anyway. Probably the librarians would like tea. Or chocolates. Or a reliable source of funding.” - Neil Gaiman

36. “The man who has a library of his own collection is able to contemplate himself objectively, and is justified in believing in his own existence.” - Augustine Birrell

37. “A library, to modify the famous metaphor of Socrates, should be the delivery room for the birth of ideas - a place where history comes to life.” - Norman Cousins

38. “Epics are never written about libraries. They exist on whim; it depends on if the conquering army likes to read.” - Patricia A. McKillip

39. “This place is a mystery. A sanctuary. Every book, every volume you see, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it & the soul of those who read it & lived it & dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down it's pages, it's spirit grows & strengthens. In this place, books no longer remembered by anyone, books that are lost in time, live forever, waiting for the day when they will reach a new reader's hands, a new spirit...” - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

40. “For him that stealeth, or borroweth and returneth not, this book from its owner,Let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him. Let him be struck with palsy and all his members blasted. Let him languish in pain crying out for mercy, Let there be no surcease to his agony till he sink in dissolution. Let bookworms gnaw his entrails in token of the worm that dieth not.When at last he goeth to his final punishment, Let the flames of Hell consume him forever.[attributed to the Monastery of San Pedro in Barcelona, Spain]” - Nicholas A. Basbanes

41. “People flock in, nevertheless, in search of answers to those questions only librarians are considered to be able to answer, such as "Is this the laundry?" "How do you spell surreptitious?" and, on a regular basis, "Do you have a book I remember reading once? It had a red cover and it turned out they were twins.” - Terry Pratchett

42. “Before parents accept the wisdeom of a school board to cut school librarians, they should ask: Will my child graduate with a 21st-century resume, or a 19th-century transcript? . . . As the information landscape becomes ever more complex, why does a school district want to abandon its professional guides to it?” - Mark Moran

43. “...I am still librarian in your house, for I never was dismissed, and never gave up the office. Now I am librarian here as well.''But you have just told me you were sexton here!''So I am. It is much the same profession. Except you are a true sexton, books are but dead bodies to you, and a library nothing but a catacomb!” - George MacDonald

44. “I love vast libraries; yet there is a doubt,If one be better with them or without,Unless he use them wisely, and, indeed,Knows the high art of what and how to read.” - John Godfrey Saxe

45. “Libraries are a force for good. They wear capes. They fight evil. They don’t get upset when you don’t send them a card on their birthdays. (Though they will charge you if you’re late returning a book.) They serve communities. The town without a library is a town without a soul. The library card is a passport to wonders and miracles, glimpses into other lives, religions, experiences, the hopes and dreams and strivings of ALL human beings, and it is this passport that opens our eyes and hearts to the world beyond our front doors, that is one of our best hopes against tyranny, xenophobia, hopelessness, despair, anarchy, and ignorance. Libraries are the torch of the world, illuminating the path when it feels too dark to see. We mustn’t allow that torch to be extinguished.” - Libba Bray

46. “Libraries store the energy that fuels the imagination. They open up windows to the world and inspire us to explore and achieve, and contribute to improving our quality of life. Libraries change lives for the better.” - Sidney Sheldon

47. “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

48. “I was under the librarians' protection. Civil servants and servants of civility, they had my back. They would be whatever they needed to be that day: information professionals, teachers, police, community organizers, computer technicians, historians, confidantes, clerks, social workers, storytellers, or, in this case, guardians of my peace.” - Marilyn Johnson

49. “They should be taking bonuses from bankers, not library books from schoolchildren. What kind of society are we building?” - Sara Sheridan

50. “When reading you have the opportunity to pause for thought & spark your imagination. It develops intellect. Nothing more threatening to a politician than a well read working class.” - Alan Moore

51. “Libraries raised me.” - Ray Bradbury

52. “I don't believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don't have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn't go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.” - Ray Bradbury

53. “Her library is a meeting place for all who love books. They discuss matters of the world and matters of the spirit.” - Jeanette Winter

54. “Public libraries have been a mainstay of my life. They represent an individual's right to acquire knowledge; they are the sinews that bind civilized societies the world over. Without libraries, I would be a pauper, intellectually and spiritually.” - James A. Michener

55. “A library is a place where you learn what teachers were afraid to teach you.” - Alan Dershowitz

56. “Controller Borasus sighed with relief. Libraries were not places of danger. It had to be a hoax.” - Diana Wynne Jones

57. “Libraries are as the shrine where all the relics of the ancient saints, full of true virtue, and that without delusion or imposture, are preserved and reposed.” - Francis Bacon

58. “Library? That sounded reasonable. As my thoughts revolved around my days surrounded by books, something miraculous happened. My anger subsided. It ebbed away as the thoughts of books, pages, and comfort entered my head.” - Rebecca Maizel

59. “Libraries really are wonderful. They're better than bookshops, even. I mean bookshops make a profit on selling you books, but libraries just sit there lending you books quietly out of the goodness of their hearts.” - Jo Walton

60. “The library is not a shrine for the worship of books. It is not a temple where literary incense must be burned or where one's devotion to the bound book is expressed in ritual. A library, to modify the famous metaphor of Socrates, should be the delivery room for the birth of ideas - a place where history comes to life.— Cited in ALA Bulletin, Oct. 1954, p.475” - Norman Cousins

61. “...it's appalling to remember that the entire Oxford University Library was sold for scrap in the mid-1500s. Nor was that situation unique to Oxford, as libraries were deconstructed throughout the land.” - Owen Gingerich

62. “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

63. “Rule number one: Don't fuck with librarians.” - Neil Gaiman

64. “The only way to make a library safe is to lock people out of it. As long as they are allowed to read the books 'any old time they have a mind to,' libraries will remain the nurseries of heresy and independence of thought. They will, in fact, preserve that freedom which is a far more important part of our lives than any ideology or orthodoxy, the freedom that dissolves orthodoxies and inspires solutions to the ever-changing challenges of the future. I hope that your library and mine will continue in this way to be dangerous for many years to come.” - Edmund S. Morgan

65. “Now, public libraries are most admirable institutions, but they have one irritating custom. They want their books back.” - Cecil B. DeMille

66. “I ransack public libraries, and find them full of sunk treasure.” - Virginia Woolf

67. “I’m completely library educated. I’ve never been to college. I went down to the library when I was in grade school in Waukegan, and in high school in Los Angeles, and spent long days every summer in the library. I used to steal magazines from a store on Genesee Street, in Waukegan, and read them and then steal them back on the racks again. That way I took the print off with my eyeballs and stayed honest. I didn’t want to be a permanent thief, and I was very careful to wash my hands before I read them. But with the library, it’s like catnip, I suppose: you begin to run in circles because there’s so much to look at and read. And it’s far more fun than going to school, simply because you make up your own list and you don’t have to listen to anyone. When I would see some of the books my kids were forced to bring home and read by some of their teachers, and were graded on—well, what if you don’t like those books?” - Ray Bradbury

68. “The most important thing of all was not the poverty of its essence, but that it was there.” - David Drake

69. “Ben wished the world was organized by the Dewey decimal system. That way you'd be able to find whatever you were looking for.” - Brian Selznick

70. “A library is a good place to go when you feel unhappy, for there, in a book, you may find encouragement and comfort. A library is a good place to go when you feel bewildered or undecided, for there, in a book, you may have your question answered. Books are good company, in sad times and happy times, for books are people - people who have managed to stay alive by hiding between the covers of a book."[Letters of Note; Troy (MI, USA) Public Library, 1971]” - E.B. White

71. “A teenager deserves a library that recognizes reality. He needs an information source and study area that does not impose arbitrary, crippling rules on him. His library should recognize that dignity and silence are not prior requisites to learning […] He would like, needs, and deserves for other people to stop trying to protect him and allow him the right to choose information for himself […] Most of all the teenager needs people in libraries to recognize and accept him as a respectable human being.” - Anne Osborn

72. “Librarians who are arguing and lobbying for clever e-book lending solutions are completely missing the point. They are defending the library-as-warehouse concept, as opposed to fighting for the future, which is librarian as producer, concierge, connector, teacher, and impresario.” - Seth Godin

73. “Walking the stacks in a library, dragging your fingers across the spines -- it's hard not to feel the presence of sleeping spirits.” - Robin Sloan

74. “Betsy returned to her chair, took off her coat and hat, opened her book and forgot the world again.” - Maud Hart Lovelace

75. “Εκείνη η τέλεια γαλήνη στη ζωή που δεν μπορεί να βρεθεί παρά μόνο στην απόσυρση, σε ένα καλό φίλο, σε μια καλή βιβλιοθήκη.” - Behn Aphra

76. “Αν έχεις ένα κήπο και μια βιβλιοθήκη, έχεις όλα όσα σου χρειάζονται.” - Cicero

77. “Οι άνθρωποι μπορούν να χάσουν τις ζωές τους στις βιβλιοθήκες. Θα πρέπει να προειδοποιούνται.” - Saul Bellow

78. “Μη δανείζετε ποτέ βιβλία σας σε φίλους. Κανένας δεν τα επιστρέφει. Τα μοναδικά βιβλία που έχουν μείνει στη βιβλιοθήκη μου είναι όσα μου εδάνεισαν κατά καιρούς οι φίλοι μου.” - Anatole France

79. “Libraries have always been there for me. Of course I'll stand up for them.” - Marilyn Johnson

80. “Αν δεν ήμουν βασιλεύς, θα ήθελα να είμαι επιστήμων. Και αν με έβαζαν στη φυλακή, η επιθυμία μου θα ήταν η φυλακή μου να μην ήταν τίποτε άλλο από μια σπουδαία βιβλιοθήκη” - Ιάκωβος της Αγγλίας

81. “Βιβλιοθήκη είναι σκέψη σε κατάψυξη” - Viscount Herbert Samuel

82. “Κανένα μέρος δεν προβάλλει τόσο έντονα τη ματαιότητα των ανθρώπινων ελπίδων, όσο μια δημόσια βιβλιοθήκη” - Samuel Johnson

83. “Μια βιβλιοθήκη είναι ένα νοσοκομείο του πνεύματος” - Αιγυπτιακό γνωμικό

84. “Μια καλή συλλογή καλών βιβλίων είναι το αληθινό πανεπιστήμιο της εποχής μας” - Thomas Carlyle

85. “Οι βιβλιοθήκες είναι οι ιματιοθήκες της φιλολογίας” - Τζων Ντνέρ

86. “Πολύ λίγα βιβλία χρειάζονται για να είναι κανείς επιστήμων και ακόμη λιγώτερα για να είναι σοφός” - Balzac Honore de

87. “Τι ευλαβείς που είναι μερικοί εκ των ‘καθώς πρέπει’ ανθρώπων, που θεωρούν καθήκον των να έχουν, και έχουν, και βιβλιοθήκην; Ουδέποτε ταράσσουν την κόνιν των νεκρών” - Δ. Γρ. Καμπούρογλου

88. “Βρίσκω την τηλεόραση πολύ εκπαιδευτική. Κάθε φορά που κάποιος ανοίγει τη συσκευή, πηγαίνω στο άλλο δωμάτιο και διαβάζω ένα βιβλίο.” - Marx Groucho

89. “Civilized nations build libraries; lands that have lost their soul close them down.” - Toby Forward

90. “When you steal from the library, you are preventing anyone else from reading that book, and the very notion makes me want to drop you in the Void.” - Piers Anthony

91. “Congratulations on the new library, because it isn't just a library. It is a space ship that will take you to the farthest reaches of the Universe, a time machine that will take you to the far past and the far future, a teacher that knows more than any human being, a friend that will amuse you and console you -- and most of all, a gateway, to a better and happier and more useful life.[Letters of Note; Troy (MI, USA) Public Library, 1971]” - Isaac Asimov

92. “What is more important to a library than anything else -- than everything else -- is the fact that it exists."[The Premise Of Meaning, American Scholar; Washington, DC, June 5, 1972]” - Archibald MacLeish

93. “If we didn't already have libraries, they would now have to be invented. They are the keys to American success in fully exploiting the information superhighways of the future.” - James Billington

94. “My guess is (it will be) about 300 years until computers are as good as, say, your local reference library in search.” - Craig Silverstein (Director of Technology, Google.com)

95. “Librarians have always been among the most thoughtful and helpful people. They are teachers without a classroom. No libraries, no progress.” - Willard Scott

96. “The acquisition of a book signalled not just the potential acquisition of knowledge but also something like the property rights to a piece of ground: the knowledge became a visitable place.” - James Wood

97. “She sounds like someone who spends a lot of time in libraries, which are the best sorts of people.” - Catherynne M. Valente

98. “In the libraryI search for a good book.We have many books,says Mrs. Rose, the librarian,and ALL of them are good.Of course she says that. It's her job.But do I want to read about TrucksTrains and Transport? Or evenHorsesHouses and Hyenas?In the fiction cornerthere are pink boksfull of princessesand girls who want to be princessesand black booksabout bad boysand brave boysand brawny boys.Where is the bookabout a girlwhose poems don't rhymeand whose Granny is fading?Pearl, says Mrs. Rose, the bell has rung.I go back to classempty-handedempty headedempty-hearted.” - Sally Murphy

99. “She was brilliant and joyous and she believed- probably correctly- that libraries contain the answers to all things, to everything, and that if you can't find the information you seek in the library, then such information probably doesn't exist in this or any parallel universe now or ever to be known. She was thoughtful and kind and she always believed the best of everybody. She was, above all else, a master librarian and she knew where to find any book on any subject in the shortest possible time. And she was wonderfully unhinged.” - Gary Paulsen

100. “The idea of a library full of books, the books full of knowledge, fills me with fear and love and courage and endless wonder.” - Elizabeth McCracken

101. “Libraries are not facing crisis, they are in crisis.” - Patrick Ness

102. “I was a hugely unchaperoned reader, and I would wander into my local public library and there sat the world, waiting for me to look at it, to find out about it, to discover who I might be inside it."[Patrick Ness slams library cuts (The Guardian, 23 June 2011)]” - Patrick Ness

103. “There's so much proscription in the lives of young people, and it's so vital to have a place that says, look, here are the doors onto the world and amazingly, you're free to choose any one you like. - Patrick Ness on Libraries” - Patrick Ness

104. “Librarians are tour-guides for all of knowledge.” - Patrick Ness

105. “THOMASINA:But then the Egyptian noodle made carnal embrace with the enemy who burned the great library of Alexandria without so much as a fine for all that is overdue!” - Tom Stoppard

106. “Libraries allow children to ask questions about the world and find the answers. And the wonderful thing is that once a child learns to use a library, the doors to learning are always open.” - Laura Bush

107. “Speaking of libraries: A big open-stack academic or public library is no small pleasure to work in. You're, say, trying to do a piece on something in Nevada, and you go down to C Floor, deep in the earth, and out to what a miner would call a remote working face. You find 10995.497S just where the card catalog and the online computer thought it would be, but that is only the initial nick. The book you knew about has led you to others you did not know about. To the ceiling the shelves are loaded with books about Nevada. You pull them down, one at a time, and sit on the floor and look them over until you are sitting on a pile five feet high, at which point you are late home for dinner and you get up and walk away. It's an incomparable boon to research, all that; but it is also a reason why there are almost no large open-stack libraries left in the world.” - John McPhee

108. “‎The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.” - Kurt Vonnegut

109. “I've got libraries in my blood.” - Charlaine Harris

110. “Interlibrary loans are a wonder of the world and a glory of civilization.” - Jo Walton

111. “Libraries are sexual dream factories. The langour brings it on.” - Siri Hustvedt

112. “Libraries were full of ideas—perhaps the most dangerous and powerful of all weapons.” - Sarah J. Maas

113. “I always say, 'Books beat boredom,' said Amanda wisely.” - Mo Willems

114. “A library outranks any other one thing a community can do to benefit its people. It is a never failing spring in the desert.” - Andrew Carnegie

115. “I have an unshaken conviction that democracy can never be undermined if we maintain our library resources and a national intelligence capable of utilizing them."[Letter to Herbert Putnam; in: Waters, Edward N.: Herbert Putnam: the tallest little man in the world; Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress 33:2 (April 1976), p. 171]” - Franklin Delano Roosevelt

116. “My mother lived alone in the ruins of the great Library, which was called Compleat, and a very passionate and dashing Library indeed. Under the slightly blackened rafters and more than slightly caved-in walls, my mother lived and read and dreamed, allowing herself to grow closer and closer to Compleat, to notice more and more how fine and straight his shelves remained, despite great structural stress. That sort of moral fortitude is rare in this day and age. By and by, my siblings and I were born and romped on the balconies, raced up and down the splintered ladders, and pored over many encyclopedias and exciting novels. I know just everything about everything—so long as it beings with A through L.” - Catherynne M. Valente

117. “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

118. “It's wrong for libraries to have limited budgets.” - Jo Walton

119. “Welcome young poet, in here you are free to follow your star to where you should be. That door of the library was the door into meAnd Lorca and Shelley said “Come to the feast.”Whitechapel Library, Aldgate East.” - Bernard Kops

120. “Reading is important.Books are important.Librarians are important. (Also, libraries are not child-care facilities, but sometimes feral children raise themselves among the stacks.)” - Neil Gaiman

121. “We are the only species on the planet, so far as we know, to have invented a communal memory stored neither in our genes nor in our brains. The warehouse of this memory is called the library” - Carl Sagan

122. “LibrariesAreNeccessaryGardens,UnsurpassedAtGrowingExcitement” - J. Patrick Lewis

123. “A library is a different kind of social reality (of the three dimensional kind), which by its very existence teaches a system of values beyond the fiscal.” - zadie smith

124. “An ancient mustiness padded the air, tinged with with an acrid scent-a trace of the war between paper and oxygen, played out in slow inexorable burn that would one day crumble this empire to dust." -page 62” - Jennifer Lee Carrell

125. “Before Gutenberg, libraries were small -- the Cambridge University library had only 122 volumes in 1424, for instance; after Gutenberg literacy became widespread.” - Larry Stone

126. “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

127. “Further, in writing, I feel corrupt and unethical if I have to look up a subject in a library as part of the writing itself. This acts as a filter--it is the only filter. If the subject is not interesting enough for me to look it up independently, for my own curiosity or purposes, and I have not done so before, then I should not be writing about it at all, period. It does not mean that libraries (physical and virtual) are not acceptable; it means that they should not be the source of any idea.” - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

128. “All across America public libraries were, and are, being shut down, while prisons-with libraries-were, and are, being built. This has been a choice the American public has been making for over thirty years.” - Avi Steinberg

129. “I was pretty sure I'd just had a nerdgasm.” - Nicole Peeler

130. “In his library he had been always sure of leisure and tranquility; and though prepared, as he told Elizabeth, to meet with folly and conceit in every other room in the house, he was used to be free from them there” - Jane Austen

131. “...bookstores, libraries... they're the closest thing I have to a church.” - Jim C. Hines

132. “Choosing a new book was like looking for treasure.” - Kit Pearson

133. “I like libraries. It's a comfort that knowledge can be save for so long. That what we learn can be passed on.” - Jackson Pearce

134. “There are many horrible sights in the multiverse. Somehow, though, to a soul attuned to the subtle rhythms of a library, there are few worse sights than a hole where a book ought to be.” - Terry Pratchett

135. “Libraries are the thin red line between civilization and barbarism."[Libraries on the Front Lines, ALA interview 2011]” - Neil Gaiman

136. “Our sense that a library is a public good and our idea of what such a place should look like derived precisely from a model created in Rome several thousand years ago.” - Stephen Greenblatt