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

"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

"My grandma always said that God made libraries so that people didn't have any excuse to be stupid."
— Joan Bauer

"Never lend books, for no one ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are books that other folks have lent me."
— Anatole France

"I attempted briefly to consecrate myself in the public library, believing every crack in my soul could be chinked with a book."
— Barbara Kingsolver (The Poisonwood Bible)

"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

"In a few minutes I heard the books' voices: a low, steady, unsupressible hum. I'd heard it many times before. I've always had a finely tuned ear for a library's accumulations of echo and desire. Libraries are anything but hushed."
— Martha Cooley (The Archivist)

"A library is books and somewhere to put them and some people who want them there.
"
— Sheila Bourbeau

"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)

"That perfect tranquility of life, which is nowhere to be found but in retreat, a faithful friend and a good library."
— Aphra Behn (The Lucky Chance)

"It took a bit of popcorn and a library snack bar to make me realize that being a librarian was about more than just giving people information. It was about serving a community. And if the community is hungry for more than just knowledge, then maybe it’s about time to open a snack bar."
— Scott Douglas

"It has long been my belief that everyone's library contains an Odd Shelf. On this shelf rests a small, mysterious completely unrelated to the rest of the library, yet which, upon closer inspection, reveals a good deal about its owner."
— Anne Fadiman (Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader)

"The secret of a good librarian is that he never reads anything more of the literature in his charge than the title and the table of contents. Anyone who lets himself go and starts reading a book is lost as a librarian...He's bound to lose perspective."
— Robert Musil (The Man Without Qualities)

"I like to imagine that library school was started because of some sort of silly bar bet where a guy got really plastered and told his buddy that he could convince people that librarians needed to be trained in the art of librarianship. Sadly, this is not the case; its roots are a bit more academic."
— Scott Douglas

"In the dark, with the windows lit and the rows of books glittering, the library is a closed space, a universe of self-serving rules that pretend to replace or translate those of the shapeless universe beyond. "
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

"I like to imagine that, on the day after my last, my library and I will crumble together, so that even when I am no more I'll still be with my books."
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

"In a library, no empty shelf remains empty for long."
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

"If every library is in some sense a reflection of its readers, it is also an image of that which we are not, and cannot be."
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

"The library knows that it is a temporary fix. We have a stamp for the inside front cover: BROKEN SPINE NOTED. It is like a bracelet worn by a diabetic. When you return the book with this message stamped inside, we know you're not the one responsible for this horrible thing. It was some other bastard before you. The book has a preexisting condition."
— Don Borchert

"The loudest elderly women always had the quietest elderly husbands."
— Scott Douglas

"We don’t have to
destroy the library of the past. We just need to give it a face-lift."
— Scott Douglas (Quiet, Please: Dispatches From A Public Librarian)

"A library is an ever-growing entity; it multiples seemingly unaided, it reproduces itself by purchase, theft, borrowings, gifts, by suggesting gaps through association, by demanding completion of sorts."
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

"Digestion of words as well; I often read aloud to myself in my writing corner in the library, where no one can hear me, for the sake of better savouring the text, so as to make it all the more mine."
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

"We can imagine the books we'd like to read, even if they have not yet been written, and we can imagine libraries full of books we would like to possess, even if they are well beyond our reacher, because we enjoy dreaming up a library that reflects every one of our interests and every one of our foibles--a library that, in its variety and complexity, fully reflects the reader we are."
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

"A library was nothing without its people. You say library and there’s this iconoclastic image of an old-lady librarian telling people to be quiet and not to run. But the thing was, that lady—that iconoclastic lady—was with us when we cleaned. She wore blue jeans, too. Maybe she was what people thought about when you said library, but she didn’t make the library. People made the library. That’s what made a library. Without them, all the sacredness was gone. It was just a building with books."
— Scott Douglas

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

"But at night, when the library lamps are lit, the outside world disappears and nothing but the space of books remains in existence. "
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

"It hardly matters why a library is destroyed: every banning, curtailment, shredding, plunder or loot gives rise (at least as a ghostly presence) to a louder, clearer, more durable library of the banned, looted, plundered, shredded or curtailed."
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

"Th' first thing to have in a libry is a shelf.
Fr'm time to time this can be decorated with lithrachure.
But th' shelf is th' main thing."
— Finley Peter Dunne

"The patron gets comfortable in bed and opens up the book -- it opens tentatively -- and the patron bends the open book backward until there is a satisfying crack and the book is a little more supple, a little easier to read. The book spine has just been broken, and a broken spine means a more submissive book."
— Don Borchert

"To be great at something, you must look to the great ones of the
past and improve on the ideas and techniques that they started. I
was motivated to do better—to improve on the ideas of others."
— Scott Douglas

"There’s something deep in the heart of every person that wants
to protect culture. The only thing about my pending career that
was changed because of 9/11 was that I began to see it was the community,
not the librarian, that was important to the library. Librarians
were only as important as the community they inspired. If I
was going to continue with this career, my job wouldn’t be to protect
information, it would be to bring the community together and
inspire them to appreciate everything a library stands for."
— Scott Douglas

"...killing rats wasn’t in my job description."
— Scott Douglas

"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)

"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)

"At night, here in the library, the ghosts have voices."
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

"Deserted libraries hold the shades of writers who worked within, and are haunted by their absence. "
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

"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)

"During the day, the library is a realm of order."
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

"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)

"Every library should try to complete on something, if it were only the history of pinheads."
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

"The world encyclopedia, the universal library, exists, and it is the world itself."
— 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)