Marcus > Marcus's Quotes

“The scariest moment is always just before you start.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“People were stupid, sometimes. They thought the Library was a dangerous place because of all the magical books, which was true enough, but what made it really one of the most dangerous places there could ever be was the simple fact that it was a library.”
― Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!

“I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! -- When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“[D]on't ever apologise 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 apologise 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

“The very existence of libraries affords the best evidence that we may yet have hope for the future of man”
― T.S. Eliot

“The only thing that you absolutely have to know, is the location of the library.”
― Albert Einstein

“I received the fundamentals of my education in school, but that was not enough. My real education, the superstructure, the details, the true architecture, I got out of the public library. For an impoverished child whose family could not afford to buy books, the library was the open door to wonder and achievement, and I can never be sufficiently grateful that I had the wit to charge through that door and make the most of it. Now, when I read constantly about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that the door is closing and that American society has found one more way to destroy itself.”
― Isaac Asimov, I. Asimov: A Memoir

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains.”
― Seth Grahame-Smith, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

“The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.”
― Anais Nin

“The difference between genius and stupidity is: genius has its limits.”
― Alexandre Dumas-fils

“Faith: not wanting to know what the truth is.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“To predict the behavior of ordinary people in advance, you only have to assume that they will always try to escape a disagreeable situation with the smallest possible expenditure of intelligence.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“A good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read.”
― Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“A university is just a group of buildings gathered around a library.”
― Shelby Foote

“What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic."

[Cosmos, Part 11: The Persistence of Memory (1980)]”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors. The library connects us with the insight and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from all our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species. I think the health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all be tested by how well we support our libraries.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“Everybody is a book of blood; wherever we're opened, we're red.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood: Volumes One to Three