Quotes About Books

The temperature reached 451 degrees and the books began smoldering.

Throughout her life, Warren published little tip sheets—"Althea's Ways to Achieve Reading"—to encourage people to find time for books. She approved of fibbing if it gave you an additional opportunity to read.

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.

One of Manning's deputies pulled Elizabeth Teoman aside and told her he didn't know if they could do anything more because the fire was so intense and the building was so hospitable to it, with the stacks acting as fireplace flues and the books providing so much fuel. He asked her to give him a list of the irreplaceable items in the building, in case that was all they could save.

they also believed that you read a book for the experience of reading it. You didn't read it in order to have an object that had to be housed and looked after forever, a memento of the purpose for which it was obtained. The reading of the book was a journey. There was no need for souvenirs.

but this is why I have come to believe that books have souls—why else would I be so reluctant to throw one away? It doesn't matter that I know I'm throwing away a bound, printed block of paper that is easily reproduced. It doesn't feel like that.

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

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.

World War II destroyed more books and libraries than any event in human history.

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

Taking books away from a culture is to take away its shared memory.

I grew up in libraries, or at least it feels that way.

grew up in libraries

within three years of its founding, OverDrive had loaned one million books, and in 2012, it had reached a hundred million checkouts. By the end of 2017, it had reached the milestone of having loaned one billion books. On an average day, seven hundred thousand books are checked out through OverDrive. The company has been so successful that, a few years ago, the Japanese conglomerate Rakuten paid $410 million to acquire it.

Taking books away from a culture is to take away its shared memory. It's like taking away the ability to remember your dreams. Destroying a culture's books is sentencing it to something wose than death: It is sentencing it to seem as if it never lived.

The irony of the Feuersprüche was that they treated books as seriously as Jews did. To feel the need to destroy them acknowledged the potency and value of books, and recognized the steadfast Jewish attachment to them.

The fire flashed through Fiction, consuming as it traveled. It reached for the cookbooks. The cookbooks roasted.

a library is an intricate machine, a contraption of whirring gears.

Althea Warren] believed librarians' single greatest responsibility was to read voraciously. Perhaps she advocated this in order to be sure librarians knew their books, but for Warren, this directive was based in emotion and philosophy: She wanted librarians to simply adore the act of reading for its own sake, and perhaps, as a collateral benefit, they could inspire their patrons to read with a similarly insatiable appetite

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

Even the oddest, most particular book was written with that kind of crazy courage—the writer's belief that someone would find his or her book important to read. I was struck by how precious and foolish and brave that belief is, and how necessary, and how full of hope it is to collect these books and manuscripts and preserve them.

I wanted fo have my books around me, forming a totem pole of the narratives I'd visited.

Libraries are physical spaces belonging to a community where we gather to share information. There isn't anywhere else that fits that description. Perhaps in the future, OverDrive will be where our books will come from, and libraries will become something more like our town squares, a place that is home when you aren't at home.

I wanted to have my books around me, forming a totem pole of the narratives I'd visited.