"Few pleasures, for the true reader, rival the pleasure of browsing unhurriedly among books: old books, new books, library books, other people's books, one's own books - it does not matter whose or where. Simply to be among books, glancing at one here, reading a page from one over there, enjoying them all as objects to be touched, looked at, even smelt, is a deep satisfaction. And often, very often, while browsing haphazardly, looking for nothing in particular, you pick up a volume that suddenly excites you, and you know that this one of all the others you must read. Those are great moments - and the books we come across like that are often the most memorable."
— Aidan Chambers

"A truly great library contains something in it to offend everyone."
— Jo Goodwin

"A great library doesn't have to be big or beautiful. It doesn't have to have the best facilities or the most efficient staff or the most users. A great library provides. It is enmeshed in the life of a community in a way that makes it indispensable. A great library is one nobody notices because it is always there, and always has what people need."
— Vicki Myron (Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World)

"I have always imagined that Paradise will be some kind of library."
— Jorge Luis Borges

"And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries."
— Kurt Vonnegut (A Man Without a Country)

"A good library will never be too neat or too dusty, because somebody will always be in it, taking books off the shelves and staying up late reading them."
— Lemony Snicket (Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid)

"People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned."
— Saul Bellow

"Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him."
— Maya Angelou

"All the books we own, both read and unread, are the fullest expression of self we have at our disposal. ... But with each passing year, and with each whimsical purchase, our libraries become more and more able to articulate who we are, whether we read the books or not."
— Nick Hornby

"A library is infinity under a roof."
— Gail Carson Levine

"Don't join the book burners. Don't think you're going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book..."
— Dwight D. Eisenhower

"You see, I don't belive that libraries should be drab places where people sit in silence, that has been the main reason for our policy of employing wild animals as librarians."
— Graham Chapman

"Don't mark up the Library's copy, you fool! Librarians are Unprankable. They'll track you down! They have skills!"
— Charles Ogden

"Libraries will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no libraries."
— Anne Herbert

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

"In the nonstop tsunami of global information, librarians provide us with floaties and teach us to swim."
— Linton Weeks

"What a school thinks about its library is a measure of what it feels about education."
— Harold Howe

"A library is not a luxury but one of the necessities of life."
— Henry Ward Beecher

"A public library is the most democratic thing in the world. What can be found there has undone dictators and tyrants: demagogues can persecute writers and tell them what to write as much as they like, but they cannot vanish what has been written in the past, though they try often enough...People who love literature have at least part of their minds immune from indoctrination. If you read, you can learn to think for yourself."
— Doris Lessing

"There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag-and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty-and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you. "
— Doris Lessing

"When I tell people I went to library school, the most common reaction is either “You’re joking, right?” or “They have schools for librarians? Do they teach you how to properly sssh people?”"
— Scott Douglas

"A great library contains the diary of the human race."
— George Mercer Dawson

"Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read."
— Groucho Marx (The Essential Groucho)

"I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book."
— Groucho Marx

"You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them."
— Ray Bradbury

"I cannot live without books."
— Thomas Jefferson

"What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though."
— J.D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye)

"You know you've read a good book when you turn the last page and feel a little as if you have lost a friend."
— Paul Sweeney

"There are two motives for reading a book; one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it."
— Bertrand Russell

"The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones."
— Joseph Joubert

"The covers of this book are too far apart."
— Ambrose Bierce

"Let children read whatever they want and then talk about it with them. If parents and kids can talk together, we won't have as much censorship because we won't have as much fear."
— Judy Blume

"book collecting is an obsession, an occupation, a disease, an addiction, a fascination, an absurdity, a fate. it is not a hobby. those who do it must do it. those who do not do it, think of it as a cousin of stamp collecting, a sister of the trophy cabinet, bastard of a sound bank account and a weak mind."
— Jeanette Winterson

"Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book."
— Jane Smiley (13 Ways of Looking at the Novel)

"May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you're wonderful, and don't to forget make some art -- write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself."
— Neil Gaiman