Top 88 Libraries Quotes

I’m not precisely saying that a really good board meeting at the MLA (Museums, Libraries and Archives Coucil) makes me want to go and write poetry, but there is a pleasure in doing that sort of thing well.

If the library’s rarest frequenters are the ones we’d like to see in them the most, then libraries are failing.

I have a passion for libraries. They are potentially real community centers.

My work has taken me from historical research to involvement in electronic publishing ventures to the directorship of the Harvard University Libraries.

One of the greatest gifts my brother and I received from my mother was her love of literature and language. With their boundless energy, libraries open the door to these worlds and so many others. I urge young and old alike to embrace all that libraries have to offer.

In the early days, I promoted the idea of spending time in libraries to gain facts that other investors didn’t have. Not many people did that kind of research, so it worked.

In America there is a public library in every community. How many public libraries are there in Africa? Every day there are new books coming out and new ideas being discussed. But these new books and ideas don’t reach Africa and we are being left behind.

You can tell a lot about your cooks’ personalities by their music collection. I personally have such an eclectic collection, partly due to the combining of music libraries with girlfriends past.

A drop in younger children visiting libraries is of great concern. As children’s laureate, I am passionate about the role of libraries, both in schools and in the wider community. They are unique places where children can begin their journey as readers, as well as being creative hubs.

I loved to read, still do, and it seemed that the writing was a result of the love of books and reading and libraries.

Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future.

I believe that when an elder dies, a library is burned: vast sums of wisdom and knowledge are lost. Throughout the world libraries are ablaze with scant attention.

Digital books and other texts are increasingly coming under the control of distributors and other gatekeepers rather than readers and libraries.

Every single day, authors read at bookstores and libraries – and coffeeshops and bars – all over the country. And these readings are amazing: you get to hear the book in the author’s own voice, ask questions, and meet the writer. For free.

Exclusively oral cultures are unencumbered by dead knowledge, dead facts. Libraries, on the other hand, are full of them.

The age of Lincoln and Jefferson memorials is over. It will be presidential libraries from now on.

I’m so concerned with morgues and libraries of the newspapers.

I was a very keen reader of science fiction, and during the time I was going to libraries, it was good, written by people who knew their science.

I would like to bring people who have never been to a museum into a museum. And I would like to bring museum goers into libraries. I think there ought to be this cross-fertilization.

But the vast majority of books ever written are not accessible to anyone except the most tenacious researchers at premier academic libraries. Books written after 1923 quickly disappear into a literary black hole.

At first, teaching was more or less a straightforward way of making a living and having access to institutional resources while writing – aka libraries. And that was not inconsiderable. But it didn’t in any way touch the writing. Maybe it would push the writing aside sometimes, but mostly it was fine.

Arnold Schwarzenegger cut teacher’s salaries and parks and libraries rather than raise taxes for the many California millionaires and billionaires.

Learning sleeps and snores in libraries, but wisdom is everywhere, wide awake, on tiptoe.

If written directions alone would suffice, libraries wouldn’t need to have the rest of the universities attached.

I would encourage nonproprietary standards for tools and libraries.

What saved me from total academic failure and overwhelming ennui, was my love of libraries and all they encompass.

You come to work because the office is a resource: The office is a place where you can meet with other people, and the office has libraries of books and information on CD-ROM that might help you with your work.

I love libraries, as anyone who has a brain does.

The pride and presence of a professional football team is far more important than 30 libraries.

In 1986 we were trying to help women get in print, stay in print, and come to the attention of booksellers and libraries. At that time, books by men mystery writers were reviewed seven times as often as books by women.

Living in Edinburgh, I consider myself particularly lucky – we have the biggest book festival in the world, a plethora of fascinating libraries and museums, and some of the greatest architecture in Europe.

Everyone in the book’s ecology, starting with the author and including the publisher, the distributor, the booksellers, the libraries, and ending up with the reader, should benefit from a healthy book trade.

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.

The atmosphere of libraries, lecture rooms and laboratories is dangerous to those who shut themselves up in them too long. It separates us from reality like a fog.

It is easier to go to the Internet than to go to the library, undoubtedly. But the shift from no libraries to the existence of libraries was a much greater shift than what we’ve seen with the Internet’s development.

A lot of my travel is at least partly work, visiting schools and libraries, especially in France.

I care about buses and libraries and schools and roads and education.

I was interested in the questions that come up when the Internet gives you access not just to JSTOR libraries and to digital information, but also to things that are live and dynamic and organic in some way.

With my childhood, it’s a wonder I’m not psychotic. I was the little Jewish boy in the non-Jewish neighborhood. It was a little like being the first Negro enrolled in the all-white school. I grew up in libraries and among books, without friends.

I’ve been devoting quite a bit of my time to harmonic studies on my own, in libraries and places like that. I’ve found you’ve got to look back at the old things and see them in a new light.

I remember the first book I bought, when I was about 11… Dad said, ‘What have you got that for? What are libraries for?’

I write in public libraries and sometimes coffee shops. I can’t write at home and gave up trying long ago. I need activity around me that I’m forced to block out. It helps me focus.

When I grew up, there were locked cabinets in public libraries. You needed parental permission if you were under eighteen. I was let down by the overblown reputations of some hardcore fictional works.

Libraries are where we learn that we can live our lives through books.

Accessible local libraries are vital to communities and to children.

Libraries can take the place of God.

I don’t want to see libraries close; I want to find local solutions that will make them sustainable.

I like shelves full of books in a library, but if all books become electronic, the task of big research libraries remains the same – keep what’s published in the form in which it appeared.

I’m envious of ‘Glee’ – artists turned their libraries over for free because they knew it would lead to album sales.

My own perception of that is somewhat colored by where people ask my advice, which is still, of course, about changes to Python internals or at least standard libraries.

Browsing for books with a mouse and screen is not nearly as joyful an act as wandering the stacks and getting lost in the labyrinthine corridors of knowledge. The best libraries are places of imagination, education and community. The best libraries have mystery to them.

To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse.

Well-run libraries are filled with people because what a good library offers cannot be easily found elsewhere: an indoor public space in which you do not have to buy anything in order to stay.

If schools don’t make books important then children who come from homes with no books, and who don’t visit libraries, will never find their way into this vital way of presenting ideas, feelings and knowledge.

I’ve been talking about the centrality of libraries in our information society for a while now.

Libraries are reservoirs of strength, grace and wit, reminders of order, calm and continuity, lakes of mental energy, neither warm nor cold, light nor dark.

I go to Amazon to browse for things I can then go find at the mall. It’s like window shopping online. I want to touch the things that I buy. I am the kid who still likes actual books, bookstores, and libraries.