Libraries have long been treasured as havens of knowledge, imagination, and inspiration. Whether you're a book lover, a student, or simply someone who appreciates the magic of words, the right quote can capture the essence of what libraries mean to us. In this collection, we've gathered 137 inspiring library quotes that celebrate the power of books, learning, and the quiet wonder found within library walls. Dive in and let these words fuel your passion for reading and discovery.
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. “The secret of a good librarian is that he never reads anything more of the literature in his charge than the title and the table of contents. Anyone who lets himself go and starts reading a book is lost as a librarian...He's bound to lose perspective.” - Robert Musil
3. “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
4. “I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.” - Jorge Luis Borges
5. “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
6. “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
7. “Me, poor man, my libraryWas dukedom large enough.” - William Shakespeare
8. “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
9. “If your library is not "unsafe," it probably isn't doing its job.” - John Berry
10. “Perhaps no place in any community is so totally democratic as the town library. The only entrance requirement is interest.” - Lady Bird Johnson
11. “Never lend books, for no one ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are books that other folks have lent me.” - Anatole France
12. “That perfect tranquility of life, which is nowhere to be found but in retreat, a faithful friend and a good library.” - Aphra Behn
13. “In a few minutes I heard the books' voices: a low, steady, unsupressible hum. I'd heard it many times before. I've always had a finely tuned ear for a library's accumulations of echo and desire. Libraries are anything but hushed.” - Martha Cooley
14. “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
15. “What a school thinks about its library is a measure of what it feels about education.” - Harold Howe
16. “Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.” - Maya Angelou
17. “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
18. “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
19. “The world is quiet here.” - Lemony Snicket
20. “The love of libraries, like most loves, must be learned. ” - Alberto Manguel
21. “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
22. “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
23. “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
24. “In a library, no empty shelf remains empty for long.” - Alberto Manguel
25. “The world encyclopedia, the universal library, exists, and it is the world itself.” - Alberto Manguel
26. “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
27. “The weight of absence is as much a feature of any library as the constriction of order and space.” - Alberto Manguel
28. “It hardly matters why a library is destroyed: every banning, curtailment, shredding, plunder or loot gives rise (at least as a ghostly presence) to a louder, clearer, more durable library of the banned, looted, plundered, shredded or curtailed.” - Alberto Manguel
29. “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
30. “To be great at something, you must look to the great ones of thepast and improve on the ideas and techniques that they started. Iwas motivated to do better—to improve on the ideas of others.” - Scott Douglas
31. “When I tell people I went to library school, the most common reaction is either “You’re joking, right?” or “They have schools for librarians? Do they teach you how to properly sssh people?” - Scott Douglas
32. “The loudest elderly women always had the quietest elderly husbands.” - Scott Douglas
33. “It took a bit of popcorn and a library snack bar to make me realize that being a librarian was about more than just giving people information. It was about serving a community. And if the community is hungry for more than just knowledge, then maybe it’s about time to open a snack bar.” - Scott Douglas
34. “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
35. “We don’t have to destroy the library of the past. We just need to give it a face-lift.” - Scott Douglas
36. “It was good to walk into a library again; it smelled like home.” - Elizabeth Kostova
37. “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 aloud for mercy, and let there be no surcease to this agony till he sing in dissolution. Let bookworms gnaw his entrails in token of the worm that dieth not, and when at last he goeth to his last punishment, let the flames of hell consume him for ever.Curse on book thieves, from the monastery of San Pedro, Barcelona, Spain” - Cornelia Funke
38. “I cannot comprehend the neglect of a family library in such days as these."- Mr. Darcy” - Jane Austen
39. “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
40. “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
41. “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
42. “What in the world would we do without our libraries?” - Katharine Hepburn
43. “Library stacks from this perspective are not a repository; they are a crowd.” - Kenneth A. Bruffee
44. “Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors.” - Umberto Eco
45. “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.” - Lemony Snicket
46. “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
47. “Your library is your paradise.” - Desiderius Erasmus
48. “A great library contains the diary of the human race.” - George Mercer Dawson
49. “You see? I know where every single book used to be in the library.' She pointed to the shelf opposite. 'Over there was Catch-22, which was a hugely popular fishing book and one of a series, I believe.” - Jasper Fforde
50. “A university is just a group of buildings gathered around a library.” - Shelby Foote
51. “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
52. “Have you really read all those books in your room?”Alaska laughing- “Oh God no. I’ve maybe read a third of ‘em. But I’m going to read them all. I call it my Life’s Library. Every summer since I was little, I’ve gone to garage sales and bought all the books that looked interesting. So I always have something to read.” - John Green
53. “When I was a child, it was a matter of pride that I could plow through a Nancy Drew story in one afternoon, and begin another in the evening. . . . I was probably trying to impress the librarians who kept me supplied with books.” - Kathleen Norris
54. “Libraries can in general be too narrow or too wide for the soul.” - Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
55. “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
56. “As I walked, I ran my fingers along the spines of hundreds of books. I let myself be imbued with the smell, with the light that filtered through the cracks or from the glass lanterns embedded in the wooden structure, floating among mirrors and shadows.” - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. “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
58. “All I wanted to do was go back inside to the library and read a book.I used to spend all my time reading books, or watching television. It was safe. Nobody ever was hurt or teased or looked stupid while reading books or watching television.” - Kathryn Magendie
59. “Come with me,' Mom says.To the library. Books and summertimego together.” - Lisa Schroeder
60. “Desire overwhelmed me once she had gone. But it was not a desire for Homer. I had to return to the library. I could already smell the books' muskiness and in my mind turned over pages with as many differing textures as a forest; pages that were brittle and fragile which had to be coaxed to turn; pages that were soft and scented, presenting their words as if the were a gift in the palm of a hand, and pages that fell open heavily of their own accord as if weighted by the importance of their message. But more than anything else I was compelled by their mystery, by all the stories they had yet to tell me.'I have to go to the library, Homer. I have to be with the books.” - Christine Aziz
61. “It had been a good day, all things considered. I had managed rather well on my own. I opened Grandfather's Bible. This is what it would be like when I had my own shop, or when I traveled abroad. I would always read before sleeping. One day, I'd be so rich I would have a library full of novel to choose from. But I would always end the evening with a Bible passage.” - Laurie Halse Anderson
62. “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
63. “I look at the books on my library shelves. They certainly seem dormant. But what if the characters are quietly rearranging themselves? What if Emma Woodhouse doesn’t learn from her mistakes? What if Tom Jones descends into a sodden life of poaching and outlawry? What if Eve resists Satan, remembering God’s injunction and Adam’s loving advice? I imagine all the characters bustling to get back into their places as they feel me taking the book down from the shelf. “Hurry,” they say, “he’ll expect to find us exactly where he left us, never mind how much his life has changed in the meantime.” - Verlyn Klinkenborg
64. “The very existence of libraries affords the best evidence that we may yet have hope for the future of man” - T.S. Eliot
65. “-Mikhail?...Try making suggestions next time, or just plain asking. You go do whatever it is you're doing, and I'll go search you extensive library for a book on manners.-You will not find it.-Why am I not surprised?” - Christine Feehan
66. “Libraries raised me.” - Ray Bradbury
67. “Corliss wondered what happens to a book that sits unread on a library shelf for thirty years. Can a book rightfully be called a book if it never gets read?...'How many books never get checked out," Corliss asked the librarian. 'Most of them,' she said.Corliss never once considered the fate of library books. She loved books. How could she not worry about the unread? She felt like a disorganized scholar, an abusive mother, and a cowardly soldier.'Are you serious?' Corliss asked. 'What are we talking about here? If you were guessing, what is the percentage of books in this library that never get checked out?' 'We're talking sixty percent of them. Seriously. Maybe seventy percent. And I'm being optimistic. It's probably more like eighty or ninety percent. This isn't a library, it's an orphanage.'The librarian talked in a reverential whisper. Corliss knew she'd misjudged this passionate woman. Maybe she dressed poorly, but she was probably great in bed, certainly believed in God and goodness, and kept an illicit collection of overdue library books on her shelves.” - Sherman Alexie
68. “The only thing that you absolutely have to know, is the location of the library.” - Albert Einstein
69. “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
70. “Steadily, the room shrank, till the book thief could touch the shelves within a few small steps. She ran the back of her hand along the first shelf, listening to the shuffle of her fingernails gliding across the spinal cord of each book. It sounded like an instrument, or the notes of running feet. She used both hands. She raced them. One shelf against the other. And she laughed. Her voice was sprawled out, high in her throat, and when she eventually stopped and stood in the middle of the room, she spent many minutes looking from the shelves to her fingers and back again. How many books had she touched? How many had she felt? She walked over and did it again, this time much slower, with her hand facing forward, allowing the dough of her palm to feel the small hurdle of each book. It felt like magic, like beauty, as bright lines of light shone down from a chandelier. Several times, she almost pulled a title from its place but didn't dare disturb them. They were too perfect.” - Markus Zusak
71. “Plenty of patrons had asked me strange things, but this was the first who asked me where my car was parked. It was almost comical to look at the man, because he actually thought I was going to tell him. I struggled to come up with a reply, but the best I could muster was, "That's personal." What I meant to say was, "Sir, the fact that I work in a public library doesn't make me stupid, it just makes me poor. There's no way I'm going to tell you—a psychotic person who could very well have a knife in his pocket—where I have parked my car.” - Scott Douglas
72. “Some people write letters, in the library.” - Margaret Atwood
73. “In the wide pile, by others heeded not,Hers was one sacred solitary spot,Whose gloomy aisles and bending shelves containFor moral hunger food, and cures for moral pain.” - Walter Scott
74. “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
75. “Nothing is more impotent than an unread library.” - John Waters
76. “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
77. “I put the books I was returning on the appropriate desk, and I began looking at the shelves of new arrivals. Most of them were some permutation on self-help. Going by how popular these books were and how often they were checked out, everyone in Bon Temps should have become perfect by now.” - Charlaine Harris
78. “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
79. “Betsy returned to her chair, took off her coat and hat, opened her book and forgot the world again.” - Maud Hart Lovelace
80. “An appetite for knowledge is apt to rush one off one's feet, like any other appetite if not curbed. I often stand in the in the centre of the Library here and think despairingly how impossible it is ever to become possessed of all the wealth of facts and ideas contained in the books surrounding me on every hand.” - W.N.P. Barbellion
81. “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
82. “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
83. “Up steps, three, six, nine, twelve! Slap! Their palms hit the library door. * * * They opened the door and stepped in.They stopped.The library deeps lay waiting for them.Out in the world, not much happened. But here in the special night, a land bricked with paper and leather, anything might happen, always did. Listen! and you heard ten thousand people screaming so high only dogs feathered their ears. A million folk ran toting cannons, sharpening guillotines; Chinese, four abreast marched on forever. Invisible, silent, yes, but Jim and Will had the gift of ears and noses as well as the gift of tongues. This was a factory of spices from far countries. Here alien deserts slumbered. Up front was the desk where the nice old lady, Miss Watriss, purple-stamped your books, but down off away were Tibet and Antarctica, the Congo. There went Miss Wills, the other librarian, through Outer Mongolia, calmly toting fragments of Peiping and Yokohama and the Celebes.” - Ray Bradbury
84. “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
85. “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
86. “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
87. “Nick chided a censor, who wished some books gone, and suggested she scan Fahrenheit 451. For the book-budget cutters, Old Claus had no plan, cause if they could read, they just read Ayn Rand.” - David Davis
88. “How can you be nervous? Don't you see? We're in a library.” - Eilis O'Neal
89. “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
90. “But I loved the library simply because it was a library. I love libraries. I like reading, but I love libraries. Being surrounded by books makes me feel safe, the way some people need trees or mountains around them to feel secure. Not me – nature’s not what I cling to. I cling to books.” - Emily Wing Smith
91. “Standing there, staring at the long shelves crammed with books, I felt myself relax and was suddenly at peace.” - Helene Hanff
92. “The record store was a place of escape. It was a library and a clubhouse” - Cameron Crowe quoted” - Gary Calamar
93. “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
94. “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
95. “There's a serendipity to real life that the Internet can't duplicate. Do you use the library? For anything? Well, sometimes you end up picking up the book next to the one you were looking for, and it's that book that changes your life.” - Laura Lippman
96. “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
97. “The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries.” - Jorge Luis Borges
98. “I always say, 'Books beat boredom,' said Amanda wisely.” - Mo Willems
99. “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
100. “Because that's what Hermione does,' said Ron, shrugging. 'When in doubt, go to the library.” - J.K. Rowling
101. “I wanted a library like this...[] A cave of words that I'd made myself.” - Maggie Stiefvater
102. “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
103. “Você constrói mil castelos, mil santuários, você não é nada; você constrói uma biblioteca, você é tudo” - Mehmet Murat ildan
104. “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
105. “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
106. “Lord Peter's library was one of the most delightful bachelor rooms in London. Its scheme was black and primrose; its walls were lined with rare editions, and its chairs and Chesterfield sofa suggested the embraces of the houris. In one corner stood a black baby grand, a wood fire leaped on a wide old-fashioned hearth, and the Sèvres vases on the chimneypiece were filled with ruddy and gold chrysanthemums. To the eyes of the young man who was ushered in from the raw November fog it seemed not only rare and unattainable, but friendly and familiar, like a colourful and gilded paradise in a mediæval painting” - Dorothy L. Sayers
107. “But we're a university! We have to have a library!" said Ridcully. "It adds tone. What sort of people would we be if we didn't go into the library?""Students," said Senior Wrangler morosely.” - Terry Pratchett
108. “Now look," snapped the Dean, "we've searched everywhere for a decent library on this island. There simply isn't one! It's ridiculous. How is anyone supposed to get anything done?” - Terry Pratchett
109. “Library. It's where we lock up all those books before they start giving kids ideas," I said solemnly. "Very dangerous place to be.” - Scott Tracey
110. “Please bury me in the library With a dozen long-stemmed proses” - J. Patrick Lewis
111. “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
112. “Πατρίδα είναι το μέρος όπου έχει κανείς τα βιβλία του.” - Πάτρικ Λη Φέρμορ
113. “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
114. “My library is an archive of longings.” - Susan Sontag
115. “Oh, wow.""What do you think?""I tried to imagine, but--I mean...it's so much more--""Think it's large enough to keep you satisfied for a while?""It's so much bigger than I expected"He backed away, leaving Beatrice to gaze in wonder at the library that took up half of the second floor."I think I'll just leave you two alone for a bit," he said with a chuckle.” - Elizabeth Hunter
116. “Who wants a library full of books you've already read?” - Harlan Ellison
117. “And the non-reading of books, you will object, should be characteristic of all collectors? This is news to me, you may say. It is not news at all. experts will bear me out when I say that it is the oldest thing in the world. Suffice it to quote the answer which Anatole France gave to a philistine who admired his library and then finished with the standard question, “And you have read all these books, Monsieur France?” “Not one-tenth of them. I don’t suppose you use your Sevres china every day?” - Walter Benjamin
118. “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
119. “In the houses of the humble a little library in my opinion is a most precious possession.” - John Bright
120. “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
121. “Isabel is looking at several collections of research journals. 'She would understand the issues if she chose to open one of the volumes, but she knew that there were conversations within which she would never have the time to participate in. And that, of course, was the problem with any large collection of books, whether in a library or a bookshop: one might feel intimidated by the fact that there was simply too many to read and not know where to start.” - Alexander McCall Smith
122. “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
123. “I'd like to be born the son of a duke with 90,000 pounds a year, on an enormous estate.... And I'd like to have the most enormous library, and I'd like to think that I could read those books forever and forever, and die unlamented, unknown, unsung, unhonored - and packed with information.” - Richard Francis Burton
124. “En África, cuando un anciano muere, una biblioteca arde, toda una biblioteca desaparece, sin necesidad de que las llamas acaben con el papel” - Amadou Hampâté Bâ
125. “He looks at me, and I don't know what he sees. I used to think it was Rose. But she's not here with us now, in this room. It's just him and me, and the books. I feel like our lives are in those books. I feel like all the words on the pages are for us.” - Lauren DeStefano
126. “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
127. “I know exactly what I would do with immortality: I would read every book in the library.” - Mark Jason Dominus
128. “Library-denigrators, pay heed: suggesting that the Internet is a viable substitute for libraries is like saying porn could replace your wife.” - Joanne Harris
129. “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
130. “Some believe that every library looks like a splendid cemetery of human thoughts and ideas. Could librarians be called grave-diggers? However that may be, like a cemetery, a library will never stop being of use.” - Lara Biyuts
131. “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
132. “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
133. “Every time I went to the library, it felt like a treasure hunt: somewhere amid those dusty books was the answer, and all I had to do was find it.” - Jean M. Twenge
134. “The library had become her solace. Her refuge.Books did not question or judge. They made safe companions.” - Inglath Cooper
135. “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
136. “We each contribute our own book to the great library of humanity.” - Steve Maraboli
137. “If peace had a smell,it would be the smell of a library full of old, leather-bound books.” - Mark Pryor
