"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)

"I came from a real tough neighborhood. In the library the sign says 'shut the fuck up!'"
— Rodney Dangerfield

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

"[D]on't ever apologize to an author for buying something in paperback, or taking it out from a library (that's what they're there for. Use your library). Don't apologize to this author for buying books second hand, or getting them from bookcrossing or borrowing a friend's copy. What's important to me is that people read the books and enjoy them, and that, at some point in there, the book was bought by someone. And that people who like things, tell other people. The most important thing is that people read... "
— Neil Gaiman

"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

"When I got [my] library card, that was when my life began."
— Rita Mae Brown

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

"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

"A library is a place where you can lose your innocence without losing your virginity."
— Germaine Greer

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

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

"You are a total stranger and you want to take my library book."
— Elizabeth Kostova (The Historian)

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

"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.... In any library in the world, I am at home, unselfconscious, still and absorbed. "
— Germaine Greer

"If this nation is to be wise as well as strong, if we are to achieve our destiny, then we need more new ideas for more wise men reading more good books in more public libraries. These libraries should be open to all—except the censor. We must know all the facts and hear all the alternatives and listen to all the criticisms. Let us welcome controversial books and controversial authors. For the Bill of Rights is the guardian of our security as well as our liberty."
— John F. Kennedy

"What in the world would we do without our libraries?"
— Katharine Hepburn

"There was the smell of old books, a smell that has a way of making all libraries seem the same. Some say that smell is asbestos. "
— Scott Douglas (Quiet, Please: Dispatches From A Public Librarian)

"I am convinced that grandkids are inherently evil people who tell their grandparents to "just go to the library and open up an e-mail account - it's free and so simple.""
— Scott Douglas (Quiet, Please: Dispatches From A Public Librarian)

"I do not understand people who will lustily throw $40,000 at the shiny red automobile of their choice, but well up with tears and become outraged when they are asked to pay $5 for a damaged videotape. Either they are fucked up and their priorities are fucked up or I am fucked up and my priorities are fucked up. Because I am me, I think it is them."
— Don Borchert (Free For All: Oddballs, Geeks, and Gangstas in the Public Library)

"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)

"In my fool hardy youth, when my friends were dreaming of heroic deeds in the realms of engineering and law, finance and national politics, I dreamt of becoming a librarian. "
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

"I have always had a special affinity for libraries and librarians, for the most obvious reasons. I love books. (One of my first Jobs was shelving books at a branch of the Chicago Public Library.) Libraries are a pillar of any society. I believe our lack of attention to funding and caring for them properly in the United States has a direct bearing on problems of literacy, productivity, and our inability to compete in today's world. Libraries are everyman's free university."
— John Jakes (Homeland)

""Did the men steal the papers?" Reynie asked, fearing her response.
"No, because they are fools," Sophie said bitterly. "They demanded to see the papers, and when I did not answer fast enough -- they were very frightening, you see -- they hurt me so that I was not awake. . . . When I opened my eyes they were still trying to find the papers. They did not understand how we organize the library, you see. They were angry and creating a bad mess. . . . The police were coming and the men decided they must leave. I shouted at them as they left: 'It is a free and public library! All you had to do was ask!""
— Trenton Lee Stewart (The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Perilous Journey)

""About the library," he whispered. He took out the pencil stub from his pocket and poised it over the page.

"Will you write like Mr. Blake or like yourself?" I inquired.

He wrote and whispered the words aloud as he did. "I am in the library. It smells like old stuff."

"It smells familiar," I suggested. "It smells like words." Because his left side was to me, I couldn't easily take his hand to write.

"Books are boring," James said as he wrote.

"They line the walls like a thousand leather doorways to be opened into worlds unknown," I offered.

He thought about this and then wrote with a smile, "I hate books."

From A Certain Slant of Light"
— Laura Whitcomb

"Nothing is pleasanter to me than exploring in a library."
— Walter Savage Landor

"“A library, to modify the famous metaphor of Socrates, should be the delivery room for the birth of ideas - a place where history comes to life.”

"
— Norman Cousins quotes (American Essayist and Editor)

"The love of libraries, like most loves, must be learned. "
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

"Epics are never written about libraries. They exist on whim; it depends on if the conquering army likes to read."
— Patricia A. McKillip

"No one stepping for the first time into a room made of books can know instinctively how to behave, what is expected, what is promised, what is allowed. One may be overcome by horror--at the cluster or the vastness, the stillness, the mocking reminder of everything one doesn't know, the surveillance--and some of that overwhelming feeling may cling on, even after the rituals and conventions are learned, the geography mapped, and the natives found friendly."
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

"A library is thought in cold storage."
— Herbert Samuel

"If the library in the morning suggests an echo of the severe and reasonable wishful order of the world, the library at night seems to rejoice in the world's essential, joyful muddle. "
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

"The humble little school library ... was a ramp to everything
in the world and beyond, everything that could be dreamed and
imagined, everything that could be known, everything that could be hoped.
"
— Lee Sherman

"Without libraries what have me? We have no past and no future."
— Ray Bradbury

""I have always thought Paradise must be a kind of library." "
— John Luis Borge

"Should he give free reign to his desires, the bibliomaniac can ruin his life along with the lives of his loved ones. He'll often take better care of his books than of his own health; he'll spend more on fiction than he does on food; he'll be more interested in his library than in his relationships, and, since few people are prepared to live in a place where every available surface is covered with piles of books, he'll often find himself alone, perhaps in the company of a neglected and malnourished at. When he dies, all but forgotten, his body might fester for days before a curious neighbor grows concerned about the smell."
— Mikita Brottman (The Solitary Vice: Against Reading)

"Libraries, whether my own or shared with a greater reading public, have always seemed to me pleasantly mad places, and for as long as I can remember I've been seduced by their labyrinthine logic, which suggests that reason (if not art) rules over a cacophonous arrangement of books."
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

"The man who has a library of his own collection is able to contemplate himself objectively, and is justified in believing in his own existence."
— Augustine Birrell

"Entering a library, I am always stuck by the way in which a certain vision of the world is imposed upon the reader through its categories and its order."
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

"The weight of absence is as much a feature of any library as the constriction of order and space."
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

"The Poet at the Breakfast Table: My experience with public libraries is that the first volume of the book I inquire for is out, unless I happen to want the second, when that is out. "
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

"I grew up in a utopia, I did. California when I was a child was a child's paradise, I was healthy, well fed, well clothed, well housed. I went to school and there were libraries with all the world in them and after school I played in orange groves and in Little League and in the band and down at the beach and every day was an adventure. . . . I grew up in utopia."
— Kim Stanley Robinson (Pacific Edge: Three Californias)

"From fire, water, the passage of time, neglectful readers, and the hand of the censor, each of my books has escaped to tell me its story."
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

"Libraries raised me."
— Ray Bradbury

"In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them."
— Mark Twain

"Epics are never written about libraries. They exist on whim; It depends if the conquering army likes to read."
— patricia a. mckillip (Alphabet of Thorn)