Quotes About Library

The publicness of the public library is an increasingly rare commodity. It becomes harder all the time to think of places that welcome everyone and don't charge any money for that warm embrace. The commitment to inclusion is so powerful that many decisions about the library hinge on whether or not a particular choice would cause a subset of the public to feel uninvited

The fire in the library was colorless. You could look right through it, as if it were a sheet of glass. Where the flame had any color, it was pale blue. It was so hot that it appeared icy. Hamel said he felt like he was standing inside a blacksmith's forge.

Interest in having a library in town persevered, and in 1872, an association formed to establish a library in the city. To raise money, the association sponsored a "Dickens Party," which partygoers attended dressed as their favorite Charles Dickens character. The party lasted for a full week. Hints to Horse-keepers and On the Sheep Industry were purchased with proceeds of the party.

transition from pre-Internet to omnipresent-Internet, and who was successfully rigging the library to sail into the future not as a gigantic, groaning, fusty pile of books but as a sleek ship of information and imagination.

In the meantime, as tax receipts dwindled, the library's budget was cut by almost a quarter.

Library users are eighty percent male, and librarians are eighty percent female, so that's something to keep in mind.

a library is as much a portal as it is a place—it is a transit point, a passage.

Usually, a fire is red and orange and yellow and black. The fire in the library was colorless. You could look right through it, as if it were sheet of glass. Where the flame had any color, it was pale blue. It was so hot that it appeared icy.

The library might have been the first place I was ever given autonomy.

After the stock market crash, book circulation rose by sixty percent, and the number of patrons almost doubled.

In 1973, the library even added a service called the Hoot Owl Telephonic Reference, which operated from nine P.M. until one A.M., long after the library was closed. Dialing H-O-O-T-O-W-L connected you to a librarian who could find the answer to almost any question.

Or the octogenarian twins—Creason and his colleagues referred to them as Heckle and Jeckle—who came to the library daily, spending their time reading Herodotus and Thucydides and telling Creason the very same joke every day for seven years.

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

to say his or her library has burned. When I first heard the phrase, I didn't understand it, but over time I came to realize it was perfect. 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.

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 they 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.

This is why I wanted to write this book, to tell about a place I love that doesn't belong to me but feels like it is mine, and how that feels like a marvelous and exceptional thing. All the things that are wrong in the world seems conquered by a library's simple unspoken promise: Here is my story, please listen; here I am, please tell me your story.

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. It is where we can glimpse immortality; in the library, we can live forever.

them. It is where we can glimpse immortality; in the library, we can live forever.

One morning, a real estate developer named Robert Maguire came for a meeting at the ARCO offices. He stood by a window and looked down on the library and the shambles it was becoming. At that moment, he made a decision to do what he could to fix it.

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 came to find them. It is where we can glimpse immortality; in the library, we can live forever.

The fire in the library was colorless. You could look right through it, as if it were a sheet of glass. Where the flame had any color, it was pale blue. It was so hot that it appeared icy.

a brutal sense of loneliness, eased only by a place like the library, where lonely people can feel slightly less lonely together.

The number of books destroyed or spoiled was equal to the entirety of fifteen typical branch libraries. It was the greatest loss to any public library in the history of the United States.

Online Computer Library Center, a global cooperative of twenty thousand libraries located in 122 countries around the world.