Best 1113 quotes in «library quotes» category

I always come here when I can't sleep [. . .] every night.

I am happy to have all the books I need to read.

I am the girl who spends hours huddled in a corner of a library, trying to find what you love the most about Marlowe, just so I can write you a poem worthy of Shakespeare. I've made books my lovers, hours my enemies and you the only story.

Avec tout ce que je sais, on pourrait faire un livre... il est vrai qu'avec tout ce que je ne sais pas, on pourrait faire une bibliothèque. With everything I know, I could create a book... and with everything I know not, I could create a library.

I close my eyes and take a deep breath, and like a gentle cloud the wonder of it all settles over me. I slowly stroke the creamish cover of the sofa, then stand up and walk over to the piano and lift the cover, laying all ten fingers down on the slightly yellowed keys. I shut the cover and walk across the faded grape-patterned carpet to the window and test the antique handle that opens and closes it. I switch the floor lamp on and off, then check out all the painting hanging on the walls. Finally I plop back down on the sofa and pick up reading where I left off, focusing on 'The Arabian Nights' for a while.

I exercised my mental muscles in the library, and lo and behold, I transformed myself from a casual reader into a focused one. So it was more than just free books, but also free space and a culture that reinforced settling down, deep reading, thinking, imagining, and exploring with my mind. I am no doubt a writer today because I had a place to go as a kid, where I knew stories were essential, and where everybody also reveled in the wonder within books.

I don't know why anyone has a living room when they could have a library instead.

I deserve a swift kick in the shorts for all the times I’ve stubbornly wound my way through the library stacks, my mule head leading the way, searching fruitlessly for information a librarian could put in my hands in a matter of minutes. – Michael Perry, Handbook for Freelance Writing

I don't understand this irony - valuable things like cars, gold, diamond are made up of hard materials but most valuable things like money, contracts and books are made up of soft paper.

If all shy, soulful young women who dreamed of becoming writers for a living actually could do that, imagine the library we would have.

If books were girls and reading was s-ss-ssss-fucking, this would be the biggest whorehouse in the county and I'd be the most ruthless pimp you ever met. Whap the girls on the butts and send them off to their tricks as fast and often as I can.

I felt for the first time that the library belonged here. The house was reclaiming its spirit, and the library, which had stood aloof and apart for so many years, was turning back into what it was always meant to be: the heart of this home.

If I have nothing but a room full of books, it is enough for me to survive life.

If God existed, he would be a library.

If I had lost everything and was out on the streets with no money I would go sit in the library and read and meditate for weeks at a time.

If you read great literature every day, you will uplift your spirit, soul and self.

If you're frightened of the countless number of books in the library, you'll never write anything, until you close your eyes and hold the pen.

...if we as librarians do not give authority, respectability, and support to new ideas and new voices, who will? If we do not provide our patrons with access to revolutionary ideas and methods of communication, who will?

If your library is not "unsafe," it probably isn't doing its job.

If you spare some space for a new book, also spare some time to read it.

If you wish to renew your mind, read.

I had a serious library at my disposal, because my Popo believed that culture entered by osmosis and it was better to start early, but my favorite books were fairy tales.

I had a friend once who looked at his library and discovered that even if he completely stopped filmmaking (he was a filmmaker too) and just decided to read the books he had in his library, it would take him until he was 100 years old. He was a little bit panicked. But he was courageous. He went out of his house. He went to the bookstore. And he bought ten books.

I had faith in the library long before he walked in and told me what I already knew: A library is a miracle. A place where you can learn just about anything, for free. A place where your mind can come alive.

I have always imagined that paradise will be some kind of library. - Jorge Luis Borges, “Poems of the Gifts

I have always kept a stack of library books next to my bed as a lifeline. If I ever woke in the middle of the night too scared to move or too sad to roll over, the books were my saviors.

...I, like Borges, think of heaven as something very like a library

I have drafts about your neck on my lips like a library has shelves. It was all in vain and you were all in my veins.

I have loved this disaster of a library since I was old enough to read.

I have rooted myself into this quiet place where I don’t need much to get by. I need my visions. I need my books. I need new thoughts and lessons, from older souls, bars, whisky, libraries; different ones in different towns. I need my music. I need my songs. I need the safety of somewhere to rest my head at night, when my eyes get heavy. And I need space. Lots of space. To run, and sing, and change around in any way I please—outer or inner—and I need to love. I need the space to love ideas and thoughts; creations and people—anywhere I can find—and I need the peace of mind to understand it.

I . . . hurried to the city library to find out the true age of Chicago. City library! After all, it cannot be anything but Chicagoesque. His is the richest library, no doubt, as everything in Chicago is great in size and wealth. Its million books are filling all the shelves, as the dry goods fill the big stores. Oh, librarian, you furnished me a very good dinner, even ice cream, but—where is the table? The Chicago city library has no solemnly quiet, softly peaceful reading-room; you are like a god who made a perfect man and forgot to put in the soul; the books are worth nothing without having a sweet corner and plenty of time, as the man is nothing without soul. Throw those books away, if you don't have a perfect reading-room! Dinner is useless without a table. I want to read a book as a scholar, as I want to eat dinner as a gentleman. What difference is there, my dearest Chicago, between your honourable library and the great department store, an emporium where people buy things without a moment of selection, like a busy honey bee? The library is situated in the most annoyingly noisy business quarter, under the overhanging smoke, in the nearest reach of the engine bells of the lakeside. One can hardly spend an hour in it if he be not a Chicagoan who was born without taste of the fresh air and blue sky. The heavy, oppressive, ill-smelling air of Chicago almost kills me sometimes. What a foolishness and absurdity of the city administrators to build the office of learning in such place of restaurants and barber shops! Look at that edifice of the city library! Look at that white marble! That's great, admirable; that means tremendous power of money. But what a vulgarity, stupid taste, outward display, what an entire lacking of fine sentiment and artistic love! Ah, those decorations with gold and green on the marble stone spoil the beauty! What a shame! That is exactly Chicagoesque. O Chicago, you have fine taste, haven't you?

I know of a private library containing several thousand volumes, which are organized neither alphabetically nor chronologically, but where the owner has instead determined the juxtaposition of hierarchy of all the books according to pure personal preference - and yet so organically has the whole place been arranged and so sovereign an overview does he have of his entire collection that he can effortlessly pick out any particular tome that someone has asked him to lend them.

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.

I live within the world of books.

I love buying books to create my sacred library.

I love to go the library to borrow books. But I also enjoyed buying books to create my sacred library.

I knew books to be objects that loved to cluster and form disordered piles, but here books seemed robbed of their zany capacity to fall about, to conspire. In the library, books behaved themselves.

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.

I love the quietness of the library, the gateway to knowledge, to the French language and medieval history and hydraulic engineering and fairy tales, learning in a very primitive form: books, something that's quickly giving way to modern technology.

I love the sound of people thinking.

I love to buying books to create my sacred library.

I may fly without feather, but I can never fly in the universe without good books.

- Ime i prezime? - zapitala je gospođa knjižničarka pogleda uprtog u članske iskaznice. - Ja sam... - prošaptalo je makovo zrno. - Ja sam... Tomičin tata. - Tomičin tata! Tata budućeg pisca! - uskliknula je gospođa knjižničarka i podigla pogled. Joj, da! Gospođa knjižničarka podigla je pogled i sledila se. - Oh, čovječe! - rekla je i zaprepašteno prinijela ruku ustima. Ispred nje stajao je čovjek koji dugo, dugo, dugo nije čitao. Dvadeset godina, možda i više! To se sasvim lijepo moglo vidjeti. Pretjerano ozbiljno lice, bore između obrva, usnice izvijene prema dolje... Da, i taj pogled, bez zvijezda, taman i hladan kao polarna noć... - Oh, čovječe, kako se osjećate? - pitala je zabrinuto gospođa knjižničarka. - Loše - rekao je tata i uzdahnuo. - Da, da - kimnula je knjižničarka sućutno i poput liječnika postavila dijagnozu: - Imaginatio destructiva progressiva. - Što? - zgranuo se tata. - Bolestan sam!? Tata nije razumio latinski, ali je slutio da je u pitanju bolest. Na posljetku, latinski je mrtav jezik. - Poremećaj mašte zbog nedostatka vitamina - tužno je zaključila gospođa knjižničarka. - No možda nije tako strašno! - tješila je knjižničarka tatu. Treba obaviti i dodatne pretrage. Hajde, zaklopite oči i zamislite... zamislite... zmaja!

Imensamente generosos, os meus livros, não me fazem nenhuma exigência, antes me oferecem todo tipo de iluminação.

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?

I mean, public libraries like this one were always short of money, so building even the tiniest of labyrinths had to be beyond their means.

Information is nutrition, knowledge is nutrition, art is nutrition and they set us free. Internet is a great library, great library is a freedom within wisdom in this digital age

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.

In college I retreated to the library. I have always loved libraries - the quiet, the smell, the expectation of imminent discovery. In the next book I will find it - some unspeakable pleasure or startling revelation or extraordinary nuance I had never felt or thought of before.

I never got int the library thing. I always liked that I could put my hand on a book when I wanted it. And to know I owned them; that was important too.