Libra Quotes

1. "A library is a place where you learn what teachers were afraid to teach you."
Author: Alan M. Dershowitz

2. "Deserted libraries hold the shades of writers who worked within, and are haunted by their absence."
Author: Alberto Manguel

3. "It hardly matters why a library is destroyed: every banning, curtailment, shredding, plunder or loot gives rise (at least as a ghostly presence) to a louder, clearer, more durable library of the banned, looted, plundered, shredded or curtailed."
Author: Alberto Manguel

4. "When she left the library, pearly threads linked roof to roof, dormer to dormer, a luminescent web under which everyone was equally chosen."
Author: Anouk Markovits

5. "His elegant librarianship ... made me appreciate how order is created: Not through grand schemes - to which I was often drawn - but by small graceful actions, repeated often and refined with time."
Author: Avi Steinberg

6. "-¿Cómo se sale de aqui?-Si tanta prisa tiene... Hay dos maneras, la permanente y la temporal. La permanente es por el tejado: un buen salto y se libra usted de toda esa bazofia para siempre. La salida temporal está por allí, al fondo, donde anda aquel atontado puño en alto al que se le caen los pantalones y hace el saludo revolucionario a todo el que pasa. Pero si sale por ahí, tarde o temprano volverá aquí."
Author: Carlos Ruiz Zafón

7. "A library and a garden is all man needs"
Author: Cicero

8. "Earlier that day, a typewriter bomb had exploded at a black market skin house over on Eel Street, sending words raining through the cardboard walls of the boudoirs and tattooing copies of the Machinist's ‘Twelve Terms' on the bodies of whores and patrons alike. Forty pieces of merch ruined. Their bodies had been obliterated by language, all traces of their sexuality buried beneath a storm of words. There was something horrific about the sight of those who had survived a typewriter attack. Their faces scarred with text, as if they had become hostages to some awful advertisement. A few of the victims took to working the streets around the library where bibliophiles sometimes paid them to satisfy their fantasies amid the desolate hush of the reading rooms and the deserted stacks where the only witnesses to this erotic pantomime of the blank body and its printed partner were other words."
Author: Craig Padawer

9. "I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it."
Author: David Foster Wallace

10. "Lord Peter's library was one of the most delightful bachelor rooms in London. Its scheme was black and primrose; its walls were lined with rare editions, and its chairs and Chesterfield sofa suggested the embraces of the houris. In one corner stood a black baby grand, a wood fire leaped on a wide old-fashioned hearth, and the Sèvres vases on the chimneypiece were filled with ruddy and gold chrysanthemums. To the eyes of the young man who was ushered in from the raw November fog it seemed not only rare and unattainable, but friendly and familiar, like a colourful and gilded paradise in a mediæval painting"
Author: Dorothy L. Sayers

11. "Honorius Hatchard had been old Miss Hatchard's great-uncle; though she would undoubtedly have reversed the phrase, and put forward, as her only claim to distinction, the fact that she was his great-niece. For Honorius Hatchard, in the early years of the nineteenth century, had enjoyed a modest celebrity. As the marble tablet in the interior of the library informed its infrequent visitors, he had possessed marked literary gifts, written a series of papers called "The Recluse of Eagle Range," enjoyed the acquaintance of Washington Irving and Fitz-Greene Halleck, and been cut off in his flower by a fever contracted in Italy. Such had been the sole link between North Dormer and literature, a link piously commemorated by the erection of the monument where Charity Royall, every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon, sat at her desk under a freckled steel engraving of the deceased author, and wondered if he felt any deader in his grave than she did in his library."
Author: Edith Wharton

12. "The idea of a library full of books, the books full of knowledge, fills me with fear and love and courage and endless wonder."
Author: Elizabeth McCracken

13. "Of all books printed, probably not more than half are ever read. Many are embalmed in public libraries; many go into private quarters to fill spaces; many are glanced at and put away...scarcely opened until the fire needs kindling. The most ardent book-lovers are not always the greatest readers; indeed, the rabid bibliomaniac seldom reads at all. To him books are as ducats to the miser, something to be hoarded and not employed... So pleasant it is to buy book; so tiresome to utilize them."
Author: Flora Haines Loughead

14. "If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want an education, go to the library."
Author: Frank Zappa

15. "I won't be sad too often,If they bury me in the libraryWith bookworms in my coffin."
Author: J. Patrick Lewis

16. "For about a whole month, at least, whenever anybody said anything that sounded campusy or phony, or that smelled to high heaven of ego or something like that, I at least kept quiet about it. I went to the movies or I stayed in the library all hours or I started writing papers like made on Restoration Comedy and stuff like that—but at least I had the pleasure of not hearing my own voice for a while."
Author: J.D. Salinger

17. "A reader's tastes are peculiar. Choosing books to read is like making your way down a remote and winding path. Your stops on that path are always idiosyncratic. One book leads to another and another the way one thought leads to another and another. My type of reader is the sort who burrows through the stacks in the bookstore or the library (or the Web site — stacks are stacks), yielding to impulse and instinct."
Author: Jane Smiley

18. "Clearly, many branches of science need an exquisite precision of timekeeping and the infinitesimal decimals of calibration, so space launches, for example, are not scheduled for leap-second dates. But society as a whole neither needs that obsessive time measurement nor is well served by it."
Author: Jay Griffiths

19. "Like the burning of the ancient library at Alexandria or the supremely ignorant incineration of stacks of invaluable Mayan codices, the loss of knowledge we are experiencing as the last of the traditional elders pass from this physical plane of existence without heirs to their knowledge- as well as the very environment in which sacred plants grow- is a tragedy occurring right now as you read these lines, one that could well be beyond redemption."
Author: Jonathon Miller Weisberger

20. "...indeed it is in the General Cemetery that the results of progress are set out before the eyes of the studious or the merely curious, there are even those who say that a cemetery like this is a kind of library which contains not books but buried people, it really doesn't matter, you can learn as much from people as from books."
Author: José Saramago

21. "Librarians. . . have been my lifelong friends, guides and heroes."
Author: Joseph Bruchac

22. "People are often dismissive of librarians and libraries - as if the words are synonymous with boredom or timidity. But isn't that where the best stories are kept? Hidden away on the library bookshelves, lost and forgotten, waiting, waiting, until someone like me comes along, and wants to borrow them?"
Author: Justine Picardie

23. "This was the doorway to the heart of the Great Keep. The one placeany son of Lila Jane Evers Wate would instinctively find his way,whether or not he was a Wayward.The library."
Author: Kami Garcia

24. "When I run the world, librarians will be exempt from tragedy. Even their small sorrows will last only for as long as you can take out a book."
Author: Karen Joy Fowler

25. "Haunting the library as a kid, reading poetry books when I was not reading bird books, I had been astonished at how often birds were mentioned in British poetry. Songsters like nightingales and Sky Larks appeared in literally dozens of works, going back beyond Shakespeare, back beyond Chaucer. Entire poems dedicated to such birds were written by Tennyson, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and many lesser-known poets. I had run across half a dozen British poems just about Sky Larks; Thomas Hardy had even written a poem about Shelley's poem about the Sky Lark. The love of birds and of the English language were intermingled in British literary history.Somehow we Americans had failed to import this English love of birds along with the language, except in diluted form. But we had imported a few of the English birds themselves — along with birds from practically everywhere else."
Author: Kenn Kaufman

26. "...we took the 10 machines we agreed were the most beguiling, and we put them on permanent exhibit in the foyer of this library underneath a sign whose words can surely be applied to this whole ruined planet nowadays: THE COMPLICATED FUTILITY OF IGNORANCE"
Author: Kurt Vonnegut

27. "Our library isn't very extensive," said Anne, "but every book in it is a friend. We've picked our books up through the years, here and there, never buying one until we had first read it and knew that it belonged to the race of Joseph."
Author: L.M. Montgomery

28. "Books on the bookshelvesAnd stacked on the floorBooks kept in basketsAnd propped by the doorBooks in neat pilesAnd in disarrayBooks tucked in closetsAnd books on displayBooks filling cranniesAnd books packed in nooksBooks massed in windowsAnd mounded in crooksLibraries beckonAnd bookstores inviteBut book-filled rooms welcomeUs back home at night!"
Author: L.R. Knost

29. "Lee threw down the tripod, and Trip dropped the FN MAG machine gun onto it...Lee hunkered down behind the big weapon. Holly handed me an RPG. The heavy tube was reassuring in my hands. Everyone dug down into the ditch, prepared to fight. Nervous but competent. Scared but professional. We were ready to put some smack down. Not bad for an accountant, a librarian, a schoolteacher, and a stripper."
Author: Larry Correia

30. "Librarians are serious people, seldomgiven to idle jocularity. The reason for this, I believe, is because we are overwhelmed by the enormous number of good books waiting to be read, leaving little time for frivolity. My personal list of must-read books presents a daunting challenge; I can't even imagine the pressure our head librarian must be under."
Author: Lynn Austin

31. "The Bibliotheque du Roi then gives you the closest thing that currently exists to God's understanding of the world.""And yet with a bigger library we could come ever so much closer."
Author: Neal Stephenson

32. "He would go somewhere no one knew him, and he would sit in a library all day and read books and listen to people breathing."
Author: Neil Gaiman

33. "Accessible local libraries are vital to communities and to children."
Author: Nick Cave

34. "...cannot possibly know who you are, you imagine that she is suspicious of all young people-as a matter of principle- and therefore what she sees when she looks at you is not you as yourself but you as yet one more querrilla fighter in the war against authority, an unruly insurrectionist who has no business barging into the sanctum of her library and asking for work. Such are the times you live in,the times you both live in. She instructs you to put the cards in order, and you can sense how deeply she wants you to fail, how happy it will make her to reject your application, and because you want the job just as much as she doesn't want you to have it, you make sure that you don't fail."
Author: Paul Auster

35. "The multiverse, she said, was like an old library whose shelves were packed with books arranged by a cataloguing system that ranked them according to similarity, each book containing within its covers a story that varied only slightly from the stories of its immediate neighbours, but by increasing degrees from those of increasingly distant books."
Author: Paul J. McAuley

36. "It is true, Monsieur," Raoule went on, shrugging her shoulders, "that I have had lovers in my life as I have books in my library, to know, to study. But I have had no passion, I have not written my own book yet! I always found myself alone when we were two. One is not weak when one remains master of one's self in the midst of the most stupefying pleasures."
Author: Rachilde

37. "As if on cue, a line of silhouettes emerged from behind a desert scrub—shapes that moved like cats. They wandered through the landscape of corpses, touching each with a gentle nudge. They grew closer, and it became clear that Chuluum was leading the other cats on their sorrowful homage, giving the fallen librarians the honor they deserved."
Author: Rahma Krambo

38. "Almost immediately, I found the red door into the library. I opened it idly- and the breath stopped in my throat. It was the same room I remembered: the shelves, the lion-footed table, the white bass-relief of Clio. But now, tendrils of dark green ivy grew between the shelves, reaching toward the books as if they were hungry to read. White mist flowed along the floor, rippling and tumbling as if blown by wind. Across the ceiling wove a network of icy ropes like tree roots. They dripped- not little droplets like the ice melting off a tree but grape-sized drops of water, like giant tears, that splashed on the table, plopped to the floor."
Author: Rosamund Hodge

39. "There was the smell of old books, a smell that has a way of making all libraries seem the same. Some say that smell is asbestos."
Author: Scott Douglas

40. "Libraries function as crucial technology hubs, not merely for free Web access, but those who need computer training and assistance. Library business centers help support entrepreneurship and retraining."
Author: Scott Turow

41. "But the vast majority of books ever written are not accessible to anyone except the most tenacious researchers at premier academic libraries. Books written after 1923 quickly disappear into a literary black hole."
Author: Sergey Brin

42. "I went to the library to look up the figures, and I found out that the episode we watched is the highest watched anything of television history, which I find amazing because it felt like just the five of us."
Author: Stephen Chbosky

43. "It had that comfortably sprung, lived-in look that library books with a lively circulation always get; bent page corners, a dab of mustard on page 331, a whiff of some reader's spilled after-dinner whiskey on page 468. Only library books speak with such wordless eloquence of the power good stories hold over us, how good stories abide, unchanged and mutely wise, while we poor humans grow older and slower."
Author: Stephen King

44. "If I have to spend time in purgatory before going to one place or the other, I guess I'll be all right as long as there's a lending library."
Author: Stephen King

45. "Garraty wondered how it would be, to lie in the biggest, dustiest library silence of all, dreaming endless, thoughtless dreams behind your gummed-down eyelids, dressed forever in your Sunday suit. No worries about money, success, fear, joy, pain, sorrow, sex, or love. Absolute zero. No father, mother, girlfriend, lover. The dead are orphans. No company but the silence like a moth's wing. An end to the agony of movement, to the long nightmare of going down the road. The body in peace, stillness, and order. The perfect darkness of death.How would that be? Just how would that be?"
Author: Stephen King

46. "You want weapons? We're in a library! Books! The best weapons in the world!"
Author: Steven Moffat

47. "Why do you ask?""Because I can.""You can what?""I can go in the private collection!" I scurried toward him. "My father had a lifetime subscriptioin, Mr. Sheridan, and not just that, but he had special privileges. I'm certain I could use his name to get you into the private collection."Daniel's jaw fell. "Why didn't you say so before?""What?" I recoiled. "How was I supposed to know you needed it?""We could've gone ages ago!"My enthusiasm transformed into outrage. "In that case, why didn't you say you needed it?""Because I didn't know you had a subscription!""Aha!" I cried, thrusting a finger at him. "Your argument's a circle!"Daniel sprang up. "We wasted all this time-""Silence!" Joseph roared. "You are like squawking parrots, and I have had quite enough. Miss Fitt, I would ask that you take Mr. Sheridan to the library immediately. Daniel, I would ask that you keep that big mouth of yours silent."
Author: Susan Dennard

48. "The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn't live boldly enough, that they didn't invest enough heart, didn't love enough. Nothing else really counts at all."
Author: Ted Hughes

49. "Knowledge equals power...The string was important. After a while the Librarian stopped. He concentrated all his powers of librarianship.Power equals energy...People were stupid, sometimes. They thought the Library was a dangerous place because of all the magical books, which was true enough, but what made it really one of the most dangerous places there could ever be was the simple fact that it was a library.Energy equals matter...He swung into an avenue of shelving that was apparently a few feet long and walked along it briskly for half an hour.Matter equals mass.And mass distorts space. It distorts it into polyfractal L-space.So, while the Dewey system has its fine points, when you're setting out to look something up in the multidimensional folds of L-space what you really need is a ball of string."
Author: Terry Pratchett

50. "Read, think well of mankind, go to our libraries and rejoice."
Author: Will Durant

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