Quotes About Library

In 1925, a man named Harry Pidgeon completed a solo sailing trip around the world, becoming only the second person ever to do so. He had gotten the building plans for his boat and most of his nautical knowledge from books he had borrowed from the Los Angeles Public Library. His boat, The Islander, was nicknamed The Library Navigator.

We were very much a reading family, but we were a borrow-a-book-from-the-library family more than a bookshelves-full-of-books family. My parents valued books, but the grew up in the Depression, aware of the quicksilver nature of money, and they learned the hard way that you shouldn't buy what you could borrow. Because of that frugality, or perhaps independent of it, they also believed that you read a book for the experience of reading it.

The last and final burning, which erased it from history forever, occurred in AD 640. By that time, the library was awe-inspiring and a little scary. People had begun to believe it was a living thing—an enormous, infinite communal brain containing all the existing knowledge in the entire world, with the potential for the sort of independent intelligence we now fear in supercomputers.

There are so many things in a library, so many books and so much stuff, that I sometimes wondered if any one single person could possibly know what all of it is. I preferred thinking that no one does - I liked the idea that the library is more expansive and grand than one single mind, and that it requires many people together to form a complete index of its bounty.

If you developed diphtheria, spotted fever, or the plague while you were in possession of a library book, you were required to inform the library, and the book had to be fumigated before it was put back in circulation, but the library covered the cost. Three

People wanted so much from the library. They wanted it to solve things for them. They wanted the library to fix them and teach them how to fix their lives.

the board believed it would be in everyone's best interest to have a man run the library.

It wasn't that time stopped in the library. It was as if it were captured here, collected here, and in all libraries—and not only my time, my life, but all human time as well. In the library, time is dammed up—not just stopped but saved. The library is a gathering pool of narratives and of the people who come to find them.

On April 29, 1986, the day the library burned

At the time, the library's fire prevention consisted of smoke detectors and handheld fire extinguishers. There were no sprinklers. The American Library Association, known informally as the ALA, always advised against sprinklers, because water damage was even worse for books than fire damage.

we were a borrow-a-book-from-the-library family more than a bookshelves-full-of-books family.

A Nigerian librarian told me that her library offers art and entrepreneurship training classes

Every problem that society has, the library has, too, because the boundary between society and the library is porous; nothing good is kept out of the library, and nothing bad... The public can come and go, but librarians are in the library all day, and their jobs include handling difficult and sometimes violent people nearly every day.

The Central Lending Library in Liverpool was completely ruined. (The rest of the city's libraries stayed open throughout the Blitz, maintaining regular hours and levying the usual overdue fines.)

By that time, the library was awe-inspiring and a little scary. People had begun to believe it was a living thing—an enormous, infinite communal brain containing all the existing knowledge in the entire world, with the potential for the sort of independent intelligence we now fear in supercomputers.

Compared to the mute towers around it, the library seemed more a proclamation than a building.

sparking floor fan resulted in the loss of all the books in Temple University's law library in 1972.

Our visits to the library were never long enough for me. The place was so bountiful. I loved wandering around the bookshelves, scanning the spines until something happened to catch my eye. Those visits were dreamy, frictionless interludes that promised I would leave richer than I arrived.

Our minds and souls contain volumes inscribed by our experiences and emotions; each individual's consciousness is a collection of memories we've cataloged and stored inside us, a private library of a life lived. It is something that no one else can entirely share, one that burns down and disappears when we die.

one more piece of the bigger puzzle the library is always seeking to assemble—the looping, unending story of who we are.

Szabo frequently preaches the gospel of the library as the people's university.

checkout machine

Why would an old couple in San Francisco give to the Los Angeles Library to save the books?" one note read. "Well, [my] father collapsed and died in the LA Public Library on July 17, 1952. Heart Attack or stroke. I never found out which. Good luck with your campaign.

We are all whispering in a tin can on a string, but we are heard, so we whisper the message into the next tin can and the next string. Writing a book, just like building a library, is a sheer act of sheer defiance. It is a declaration that you believe in the persistence of memory.