I was fired from my first job in New York. I was just out of school, doing the Welsh play, ‘The Corn Is Green,’ at Equity Library Theater. I was studying with Uta Hagen, and I was really working well, but they got nervous. They wanted results right away. We had a run-through, and I wasn’t there yet, so they fired me.
I always knew from that moment, from the time I found myself at home in that little segregated library in the South, all the way up until I walked up the steps of the New York City library, I always felt, in any town, if I can get to a library, I’ll be OK. It really helped me as a child, and that never left me.
Sometimes the best reading comes just by accident. Someone talks about a book, or you’re just wandering the stacks in the library, and you find a book that you love.
Every child in American should have access to a well-stocked school library.
In 2009, the American Library Association recorded 460 challenges reported to the Office of Intellectual Freedom.
Google’s library plan was staggering and exciting – it wasn’t the idea I objected to, but the method.
For some 25 years, I worked as a librarian, first at the New York Public Library, then at Trenton State College in New Jersey. My life has always been with, around, and for books.
A man will turn over half a library to make one book.
Books in a large university library system: 2,000,000. Books in an average large city library: 10,000. Average number of books in a chain bookstore: 30,000. Books in an average neighborhood branch library: 20,000.
When I read about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that American society has found one more way to destroy itself.
In London, I discovered a peculiar building by Holland Park where the globe was shrunk to fit a British perspective, but which had a library with Sri Lankan books I had never seen before.
Between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four, I must have read a whole library.
Every day, three times per second, we produce the equivalent of the amount of data that the Library of Congress has in its entire print collection, right? But most of it is like cat videos on YouTube or 13-year-olds exchanging text messages about the next Twilight movie.
My office in New York is overflowing with all kinds of cookbooks, and in New Orleans we have a huge culinary library. So yeah, I guess I’m a little bit obsessed.
I was that kid with the glasses and the hungry expression who haunted every library book sale and used bookstore in town: the one who always has a book in one hand and is reaching for the next book with the other. There’s one in every town.
I couldn’t go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.
I spent many, many hours in the stack at the University of Washington library just wandering around, when my dad was working, as a kid.
I remember that I used to get lots of books from the library, and ‘Little Women’ was one of them. And I used to just cross out the parts of it that really upset me because it’s such a sad book in so many ways. I’d cross out the parts that upset me, and I would rewrite new endings.
A library is thought in cold storage.
If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want an education, go to the library.
With the exception of undertakers, athletes are the only professionals obliged to feign sorrow on a daily basis, pretending that every June baseball loss is a tragedy requiring library silence in the clubhouse.
I loved doing problems in school. I’d take them home and make up new ones of my own. But the best problem I ever found, I found in my local public library. I was just browsing through the section of math books and I found this one book, which was all about one particular problem – Fermat’s Last Theorem.
I love the Web, but the basis of my work is going through the physical books. When you go to the library, you see other books around on the shelves that you never knew existed. You can flip through a book and see the whole outline of it.
A library is a place that is a repository of information and gives every citizen equal access to it. That includes health information. And mental health information. It’s a community space. It’s a place of safety, a haven from the world.
I remember, in school during English lessons, I would ask the teacher what were the most difficult books to read, and when she’d say ‘Ulysses’ or something, I’d run off to the library to check out a copy, eager to attempt the most difficult mountain.
The library companies have made it so that music is so cheap to license. They do sound-alikes of every band, and it makes it harder for the actual bands to get any decent paychecks for licensing.
A library is the delivery room for the birth of ideas, a place where history comes to life.
I was obsessed with George Orwell for years. I remember going to the town library and having to put in interlibrary loan requests to get the compilation of his BBC radio pieces. I had to get everything he ever wrote.
I miss the reference section at the library. I used to go there twice a week on missions. Now everywhere’s a research library and I can’t get an elitist kick from it any more.
I want to take everything I have in me, weave it, merge it with the beauty that is in the Library of Congress, all the resources, the guidance of the staff and departments, and launch it with the heart-shaped dreams of the people.
Just be a cool grandpa who’s creative, and hang out and tell stories and read a book in the library.
I remember going to a monastery library when I was very young and being surrounded by ancient books. I fell in love.
I am in Boston right now, in fact, to do work at the New England Historical Genealogical Library, where I’m trying to finish up tracing my lineage back to the seventeenth century.
My first job was as an assistant in the local library. Self-fulfilling prophecy?
I was always looking ahead. I used to do all kinds of things for entertainment. When I was young, we had no radio, no TV. We were 30 miles from the public library, out in the sticks in Western Kansas, and so I’d do arithmetic exercises.
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.
I usually get up not before 9. I have a huge library – I’m a big fan of Scandinavian crime fiction – so I’ll usually take a book and go off to one of my favorite bistros for a cappuccino or espresso or maybe I’ll have some lovely smoked salmon for breakfast.
A man should keep his little brain attic stocked with all the furniture that he is likely to use, and the rest he can put away in the lumber-room of his library, where he can get it if he wants it.
It was an incredible resource. I’d sit with a big stack of bound New Yorkers in the library and read through, especially the ‘Talk of the Town’ sections.
I’ve always been a ravenous consumer of opinion. When I was in my high school library and my college library, I would read ‘National Review’ and I would read ‘The Nation’ and I would read ‘The American Spectator’ and I would read ‘Mother Jones.’
I discovered me in the library. I went to find me in the library.
Kissinger’s monopoly on this historical record has driven many scholars to distraction. Groups of lawyers, scholars, journalists and archivists have used pronunciamento, lawsuit, and other crowbars in a usually vain effort to open Kissinger’s Library of Congress cache.
ArcGIS includes a Living Atlas of the World. It’s like a large living library of geographic information.
If I’m researching something strange and rococo, I’ll go to the London Library or the British Library and look it up in books.
So he said ‘I’m going to chop off the bottom of one of your trouser legs and put it in a library.’ I thought ‘That’s a turn-up for the books.’
I was on my own at Wellesley, surrounded by a lot of young women who were motivated and intellectually curious. I started to read because I was required to do so for class, but I soon found myself enjoying the seclusion of the library. I came to see reading as an important way to learn about people, including myself.
There are probably a few library fines I haven’t paid yet, but I’m a pretty clean-cut guy overall.
‘Anna Karenina.’ I read it in college. I was so engrossed that I couldn’t stop reading it and neglected all my other studies. I would go to the library even on nice warm weekends and just lock myself up. I think that was the first time that I felt transformed by a book.
I came across ‘The Song of Achilles’ by Madeline Miller in one of the most romantic ways one can find a story. I was digging through a pile of used books at my local library when my hand gravitated toward its brilliant teal and glistening gold cover.
I used to steal from the library, which is a crime and it’s bad, but I just couldn’t get enough books, and I also didn’t like to give them back once I’d read them. I just read everything.
I wanted to see my name on the cover of a book. If your name is in the Library of Congress, you’re immortal.
Even as the Internet has revived hope of a universal library and Google seems to promise an answer to every query, books have remained a dark region in the universe of information. We want books to be as accessible and searchable as the Web. On the other hand, we still want them to be books.