Quotes about Library

Come indoors then, and open the books on your library shelves. For you have a library and a good one. A working library, a living library; a library where nothing is chained down and nothing is locked up; a library where the songs of the singers rise naturally from the lives of the livers.

Books are everywhere; and always the same sense of adventure fills us. Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack. Besides, in this random miscellaneous company we may rub against some complete stranger who will, with luck, turn into the best friend we have in the world.

And my experience with public libraries is that the first volume of the book I inquire for is out, unless I happen to want the second, when that is out.

Most people enter a library and don't hear a thing. Eerie silence. I stand between the shelves and hear ten thousand conversations occurring all at once. Each ushering an invitation. The noise is raucous.

The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library to make one book.

Father said it used to be a gentleman was known by his books, nowadays he is known by the ones he has not returned.

A library is but the soul's burial-ground. It is the land of shadows.

A little library, growing every year, is an honorable part of a man's history. It is a man's duty to have books.

A library implies an act of faith which generations, still in darkness hid, sign in their night in witness of the dawn. À qui la faute? (1872)

You know, sometimes I'll go to an 8th-grade graduation and there's all that pomp and circumstance and gowns and flowers. And I think to myself, it's just 8th grade ... An 8th-grade education doesn't cut it today. Let's give them a handshake and tell them to get their butts back in the library!

And so the moment we persuade a child, any child, to cross that threshold into a library, we've changed their lives forever, and for the better. This is an enormous force for good.

I'm also hard at work on plans for the Obama Library. And some have suggested that we put it in my birthplace, but I'd rather keep it in the United States. Did anybody not see that joke coming? Show of hands.