Quotes About Books

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.

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.

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.

understood how fundamental books were to Jewish culture, theology, and identity

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.

Even books I don't want, or books that are so worn out and busted that they can't be read any longer, cling to me like thistles.

Once words and thoughts are poured into them, books are no longer just paper, ink, and glue: They take on a kind of human vitality.

The biggest library fire in American history had been upstaged by the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown. The books burned while most of us were waiting to see if we were about to witness the end of the world.

They are saving books by returning them to their origins—to the tradition of oral storytelling, which gave stories their durability before paper and ink could.

Unexpectedly, Bradbury's description of books on fire isn't horrible; in fact, they seem marvelous, almost magical. He describes them as "black butterflies" or roasted birds, "their wings ablaze with red and yellow feathers." In the book, fire isn't repulsive; it's seductive—a gorgeous, mysterious power that can transmute material objects.

Destroying a culture's books is sentencing it to something worse than death: It is sentencing it to seem as if it never lived.

Encyclopedias?" he asked George. "So damn heavy.

A library is a good place to soften solitude; a place where you feel part of a conversation that has gone on for hundreds and hundreds of years even when you're all alone.

Work helped distract him from his morbid state of mind. The library wasn't his biggest project, but he was exhilarated by it. He approached it with a kind of freedom he had never experienced before. He believed that its design could fuse everything he had learned and loved in the visual world into a monument to things he valued most: history, books, philosophy, design, aspiration, creativity.

In Beijing, about a third of library books are borrowed out of vending machines around the city.

One of the many optimistic convictions punctured by the riots was the belief that books were good and true - that on the shelves of libraries, you could find all the answers to all the questions. Life now seemed juddering and inexplicable, beyond the reach of what we could ever know or understand.

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.

Destroying a culture's books is sentencing it to something worse than death: It is sentencing it to seem as if it never lived.

I have come to believe that books have souls—why else would I be so reluctant to throw one away?

Books are a sort of cultural DNA, the code for who, as a society, we are, and what we know. All the wonders and failures, all the champions and villains, all the legends and ideas and revelations of a culture last forever in its books.

People think that libraries are quiet, but they really aren't. They rumble with voices and footsteps and a whole orchestral range of book-related noises—the snap of covers clapping shut; the breathy whisk of pages fanning open; the distinctive thunk of one book being stacked on another; the grumble of book carts in the corridors.

Public libraries in the United States outnumber McDonald's; they outnumber retail bookstores two to one.