Quotes About Library

To do the intellectually demanding work of writing, I leave my home office and my three beloved computer monitors to work at the wonderful old library that's just a block from my apartment. The atmosphere of a library helps me to think. When I want to take a break, instead of heading to the kitchen for a snack, I wander among the many floors of books.

Nothing is so intimately a part of a man as his library. It contains just what the possessor wants to look at most often, and comes to form his window or gateway to the larger cosmos.

The strange things of the past which I learnt during those nocturnal meetings with the dead he dismisses as the fruits of my lifelong and omnivorous browsing amongst the ancient volumes of the family library. Had it not been for my old servant Hiram, I should have by this time become quite convinced of my madness. But

I came across 'The Song of Achilles' by Madeline Miller in one of the most romantic ways one can find a story. I was digging through a pile of used books at my local library when my hand gravitated toward its brilliant teal and glistening gold cover.

Perhaps no place in any community is so totally democratic as the town library. The only entrance requirement is interest.

It was an incredible resource. I'd sit with a big stack of bound New Yorkers in the library and read through, especially the 'Talk of the Town' sections.

We didn't have a phone when I was a kid, and I was too shy to smash any public phones, and our town didn't have a pool hall either, so I had to hang out at the public library - and anyway, I told myself stories.

Though Lexington is not a small town, it sometimes feels like one, with circles of acquaintance overlapping once, then again; the person you meet by chance at the library or the pool may turn out to be the best friend of your down-the-street neighbor. Maybe that's why people are so friendly here, so willing to be unhurried.

I am in Boston right now, in fact, to do work at the New England Historical Genealogical Library, where I'm trying to finish up tracing my lineage back to the seventeenth century.

I have said repeatedly that in this country we track library books better than we do sex offenders.

A circulating library in a town is as an evergreen tree of diabolical knowledge.

I always carry a pistol when I go [to the New York Public Library]. Never did trust those stone lions.

I knew books to be objects that loved to cluster and form disordered piles, but here books seemed robbed of their zany capacity to fall about, to conspire. In the library, books behaved themselves.

What kind of life can you have in a house without books?

Books are a great equalizer. You may not have the money to travel the world, but with a library card as your passport your horizons for exploration and self-discovery are unlimited.

I remember that I stood on the library steps holding my books and looking for a minute at the soft hinted green in the branches against the sky and wishing, as I always did, that I could walk home across the sky instead of through the village.

I love the place; the magnificent books; I require books as I require air.

People who want to understand democracy should spend less time in the library with Aristotle and more time on the buses and in the subway.

I imagined Stephen's companion was a beautiful woman. Her form and coloring changed with my moving thoughts, but the idea that she existed remained to nag at me, and even though she was only a spook of my jealousy, I couldn't stop the surge of fantasies about her and Stephen. By the time I left the library, I had invented several elaborate plots involving the two of them.

Walking across campus made me feel sad, and I thought to myself, I wasn't happy there. Then, after reading, we walked past Butler Library. It was dark, but the light inside illuminated the windows. Students were reading and working, and those lit windows gave me a wonderful, weightless feeling. I understood for the first time how happy I had been there - in the library.

Again, I don't fully understand my emotion response to the library or trust it. It was the site of a series of intellectual revelations that were crucial to me, not just as a student but as a human being.

In college I retreated to the library. I have always loved libraries - the quiet, the smell, the expectation of imminent discovery. In the next book I will find it - some unspeakable pleasure or startling revelation or extraordinary nuance I had never felt or thought of before.

It may be that I link every library to that first one - to my early childhood experience of drawing on the floor near my father's desk. A library is of course a real place, but it is also an unreal one. What happens there is mostly silent. I think I've always liked the whispering aspect of libraries, the hushing librarians and my feeling of solitude among many.

The very idea of a library for me is bound to my mother and father and includes the history of my own metamorphosis through books, fictions that are no less part of me than much of my own history.