The real tragedy of the Library at Alexandria was not that the incendiaries burned immensely, but that they had neither the leisure nor the taste to discriminate.
I read all the time. I love it. My fantasy would be to be locked into a library. I’d be very, very happy.
Immigrants use the library often. A lot of them don’t have access to books and Internet at home. They seem so disconnected to the city.
From fifth grade on, I worked at our public library. The pay, a pittance, was almost superfluous. All through high school, I looked forward to summer as the time when I could work at the library four or five days a week. I was never a camp counselor, a lifeguard, a scooper of ice cream.
I went to the library and found lots of material about this time, about the Freedom March and what was going on down there in 1964.
The library of my elementary school had this great biography section, and I read all of these paperback biographies until they were dog-eared. The story of Eleanor Roosevelt and Madame Curie and Martin Luther King and George Washington Carver and on and on and on.
I once called construction companies to bid on an addition to the school library so that there would suddenly be people outside, measuring the building. ‘Who authorized this?’ the principal would ask. The answer: ‘Howie Mandel.’
Sometimes I’m asked if I do research for my stories. The answer is yes and no. No, in the sense that I seldom plow through books at the library to gather material. Yes, in the sense that the first fifteen years of my life turned out to be one big research project.
The library, with its Daedalian labyrinth, mysterious hush, and faintly ominous aroma of knowledge, has been replaced by the computer’s cheap glow, pesky chirp, and data spillage.
I used to read music books when I was 13. My mom was working at a library. She’s a librarian. I would get my mom to check out any kind of books that had anything to do with the music industry. I read a lot about royalities, publishing, marketing, stuff like that.
I came to writing because I joined the North Clare Writers’ Workshop, which met every week at Ennistymon Library.
We see ourselves as the world’s digital library. That can be a lot more than books. We do want to expand to other types of content: sheet music, magazines, user-generated content.
In Liverpool, where I live, we have a brilliant library which has been refurbished, and I like going there.
As a journalist I’m comfortable doing library research, and I did a lot! I had a fellowship at Radcliff for a year which gave me access to the Harvard system.
For good or ill, communism transformed the globe, but how many of us realise the crucial role played by a Manchester public library – Chethams, the oldest library in the English-speaking world – in the honing of that ideology?
My great-grandfather was a self-taught man, and his library was extraordinary. I read the lot.
If I was at home, I’d find myself checking email and looking at the Internet when I should be working. In the library, I can get an awful lot done in a couple of hours, but it can become quite sociable, which you have to watch out for. There are a lot of people you can pop out and have a coffee with.
At some point, I picked up an old library copy of ‘To The Lighthouse’ someone had bought for 25 cents. I began to read and didn’t stop until the sun had blistered my back. A mysterious rightness, a beautiful submerged truth had invaded me, one that has ever since seemed slightly beyond my grasp.
My mother was almost entirely responsible for my cultural education. She took me to the library once a week, and by the age of seven, I was reading 100 books a year.
My dad was a very unconventional Asian American man. He was very much not quiet, not shy, not passive. If he had to fart, he’d do it in the library. He did not care. He was like, ‘I don’t know these people. I’m uncomfortable, and I need to let it go.’
I always say that the real success of Wine Library wasn’t due to the videos I posted, but to the hours I spent talking to people online afterward, making connections and building relationships.
It is an awfully sad misconception that librarians simply check books in and out. The library is the heart of a school, and without a librarian, it is but an empty shell.
Gone are the days when your indiscretions at university were recorded in a roneoed college newsletter of which there is only one copy left tucked in a filing cabinet at the back of a library. Today that same college newsletter is online, accessible by the whole world now and forever.
Now, many public libraries want to lend e-books, not simply to patrons who come in to download, but to anybody with a reading device, a library card and an Internet connection. In this new reality, the only incentive to buy, rather than borrow, an e-book is the fact that the lent copy vanishes after a couple of weeks.
I read the ‘New Yorker’ when I was a kid. I used to love the cartoons and pick the cartoons out of the library, so I felt I knew the world of their cartoons.
When I won my way to the international science fair, I didn’t want to embarrass myself. It was the first time I was going to be away from home, the first time taking an airplane. I went to the local library, checked out every single etiquette book, and I read those books like I was uncovering some sort of treasure.
I collect musical theatre anthologies. I have a whole library of them.
My mother brought us to the library every week, and I read a lot. That’s what kept me company. I went from school to school, but there was always reading.
My interior is very, very dense – Proustian-looking, sort of Henry James. The walls are covered in pictures, and I transformed the big drawing room into a library lined with books.
I got kicked out in grade school because I staged a riot because I wanted more library time.
We didn’t have a phone when I was a kid, and I was too shy to smash any public phones, and our town didn’t have a pool hall either, so I had to hang out at the public library – and anyway, I told myself stories.
There were two free public libraries within walking distance of my home; I remember taking six books home from every visit, the limit set by the library.
The end of ‘Hollow City’ left the peculiar children in a very precarious spot, and that’s just where ‘Library of Souls’ begins.
I always have to go out to work even if it’s just a desk somewhere or an office or the British Library.
That perfect tranquillity of life, which is nowhere to be found but in retreat, a faithful friend and a good library.
I became a librarian at the Sainte-Genevieve Library in Paris. I made this gesture to rid myself of a certain milieu, a certain attitude, to have a clean conscience, but also to make a living. I was twenty-five. I had been told that one must make a living, and I believed it.
My mom used to tell me that the most valuable thing she owned was her library card. We were poor, but that’s not what she was talking about. My mom knew that education opened doors and opened minds.
When I go to a library and I see the librarian at her desk reading, I’m afraid to interrupt her, even though she sits there specifically so that she may be interrupted, even though being interrupted for reasons like this by people like me is her very job.
Your library is your paradise.
I wanted to sail when I was in grammar school and well remember memorizing the names of the sails from the Merriam-Webster’s ponderous dictionary in the library. Now I am actually at sea – as a passenger, of course, but at sea nevertheless – and bound for Ecuador.
We will have a total chaos without books, literature, and library.
A family living at the poverty level is unlikely to be able to afford a computer at home. Even with a computer, access to the Internet is another significant expense. A child might borrow a book from a public library; but it is not possible to take a computer home.
We never had a giant library or owned a lot of commercial characters the way most studios did. And since we didn’t have a lot of internal resources, we had to find ways to be inventive and resourceful, which I think is a healthy way to run a good business.
I’ve always loved to paint – I was studying to do an art degree when I was approached to become a model – and I’ve being doing some design work as well. I also love just having a quiet time, sitting in my little library at home in Brooklyn and reading or watching documentaries or listening to music.
When I first moved to L.A., I didn’t have a lot of money to join a gym or take classes, so I improvised. My sister and I went to the library and looked over their DVD collection and discovered Neena and Veena, these Egyptian twins who have a whole series of belly dancing routines. We did them all.
I was a member of Corstorphine Library in Edinburgh, and every Friday night, my parents took me there to borrow books. I also used to spend nearly all my pocket money on books.
If you’re setting a game during the Cuban Missile Crisis, look through a library. find out what people were wearing, what other issues were in the news, how houses were furnished, what cars were being driven. Especially include things which now seem foreign.
During the week that I arrived in the United States, I saw an airport, used a telephone, used a library, talked with a scientist, and was shown a computer for the first time in my life.
