“Come indoors then, and open the books on your library shelves. For you have a library and a good one. A working library, a living library; a library where nothing is chained down and nothing is locked up; a library where the songs of the singers rise naturally from the lives of the livers.”

“Jane Austen's books, too, are absent from this library. Just that one omission alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn't a book in it.”

“To reduce a library to simple architecture, bricks and mortar is a mistake. Similarly, to suggest a library is defined by the books on the shelf is erroneous. Libraries are very special spaces, spaces where people come together in separate but joint pursuits of knowledge, of learning. Libraries are the heartbeats of communities.”

“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.”

“Reading is at the center of our lives. The library is our brain. Without the library, you have no civilization.”

“Live in the library, for Christ’s sake! Don’t live on your goddamn computers and the internet and all that crap. Go to the library!”