libraries

Many existing top 20 Scottish writers have flourished in part because of good turns done by institutions, arts community, libraries and bookshops.

When my father first took me to Ennis Library I went down among the shelves and felt company, not only the company of writers, but the readers too, because they had lifted and opened and read these books. The books were worn in a way they can only get worn by hands and eyes and minds

Elizabeth sank into the leather wing chair in the library of her mind and began to read.

That's what I like so much about old libraries - they smell the way we'd like to imagine the past.

My two favourite things in life are libraries and bicycles. They both move people forward without wasting anything. The perfect day: riding a bike to the library.

Before Gutenberg, libraries were small -- the Cambridge University library had only 122 volumes in 1424, for instance; after Gutenberg literacy became widespread.

I was lost in a magical mystic world as I step into the old university library. This place I would say is the birth place of the __riter_ in me and still one of my most loved places in the world. It was always peaceful there. Each and every moment I spent their searching for books or walking on unknown paths with the un-quenching thirst for knowledge, is cherished in my mind forever. The dark dusty corners all brown and the smell of old books untouched by readers for years, the quiet long walking passages between overloaded bookshelves were places where my magical world existed.

We are the only species on the planet, so far as we know, to have invented a communal memory stored neither in our genes nor in our brains. The warehouse of this memory is called the library

Librarians are tour-guides for all of knowledge.

Libraries are sanctuaries from the world and command centers onto it: here in the quiet rooms are the lives of Crazy Horse and Aung San Suu Kyi, the Hundred Years' War and the Opium Wars and the Dirty War, the ideas of Simone Weil and Lao-Tzu, information on building your sailboat or dissolving your marriage, fictional worlds and books to equip the reader to reenter the real world. They are, ideally, places where nothing happens and where everything that has happened is stored up to be remembered and relived, the place where the world is folded up into boxes of paper. Every book is a door that opens onto another world, which might be the magic that all those children's books were alluding to, and a library is a Milky Way of worlds.

...Because a book is a little empathy machine. It puts you inside somebody else__ head. You see out of the world through somebody else__ eyes. It__ very hard to hate people of a certain kind when you__e just read a book by one of those people.

In the libraryI search for a good book.We have many books,says Mrs. Rose, the librarian,and ALL of them are good.Of course she says that. It's her job.But do I want to read about TrucksTrains and Transport? Or evenHorsesHouses and Hyenas?In the fiction cornerthere are pink boksfull of princessesand girls who want to be princessesand black booksabout bad boysand brave boysand brawny boys.Where is the bookabout a girlwhose poems don't rhymeand whose Granny is fading?Pearl, says Mrs. Rose, the bell has rung.I go back to classempty-handedempty headedempty-hearted.

Forgive, I hope you won't be upset, but when I was a boy I used to look up and see you behind your desk, so near but far away, and, how can I say this, I used to think that you were Mrs. God, and that the library was a whole world, and that no matter what part of the world or what people or thing I wanted to see and read, you'd find and give it to me.

[W]hat people truly desire is access to the knowledge and information that ultimately lead to a better life--the collected wisdom of the ages found only in one place: a well-stocked library.To the teachers and librarians and everyone on the frontlines of bringing literature to young people: I know you have days when your work seems humdrum, or unappreciated, or embattled, and I hope on those days you will take a few moments to reflect with pride on the importance of the work you do. For it is indeed of enormous importance--the job of safeguarding and sharing the world's wisdom.All of you are engaged in the vital task of providing the next generation with the tools they will need to save the world. The ability to read and access information isn't just a power--it's a superpower. Which means that you aren't just heroes--you're superheroes. I believe that with all my heart.

When spring comes, I shall meet you at the Municipal Library, and you will see how much I've learned! You'll be so proud of me and love me so!''Oh, Ell, but I do love you! Right now!''One can always bear more love,' the Wyverary purred.

Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors. The library connects us with the insight and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from all our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species. I think the health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all be tested by how well we support our libraries.

In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.

Time has become quiet flexible inside the library. (This is true of most places with interesting books. Sit down to read for twenty minutes, and suddenly it's dark, with no clue as to where the hours have gone.)