library

I have always had a special affinity for libraries and librarians, for the most obvious reasons. I love books. (One of my first Jobs was shelving books at a branch of the Chicago Public Library.) Libraries are a pillar of any society. I believe our lack of attention to funding and caring for them properly in the United States has a direct bearing on problems of literacy, productivity, and our inability to compete in today's world. Libraries are everyman's free university.

A library was nothing without its people. You say library and there__ this iconoclastic image of an old-lady librarian telling people to be quiet and not to run. But the thing was, that lady__hat iconoclastic lady__as with us when we cleaned. She wore blue jeans, too. Maybe she was what people thought about when you said library, but she didn__ make the library. People made the library. That__ what made a library. Without them, all the sacredness was gone. It was just a building with books.

Harry _ I think I've just understood something! I've got to go to the library!__nd she sprinted away, up the s

A public library is the most democratic thing in the world. What can be found there has undone dictators and tyrants: demagogues can persecute writers and tell them what to write as much as they like, but they cannot vanish what has been written in the past, though they try often enough...People who love literature have at least part of their minds immune from indoctrination. If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.

Because I'm the kind of girl who fantasizes about being trapped in a library overnight.

I cannot comprehend the neglect of a family library in such days as these."- Mr. Darcy

It's like a sealed, forgotten chamber in me; I shan't feel complete until I've discovered its entrance.' 'Sounds like a tomb. Aren't you afraid of what you'll find in there?' 'It's a library; only the stupid and the evil are afraid of those.

To be great at something, you must look to the great ones of thepast and improve on the ideas and techniques that they started. Iwas motivated to do better__o improve on the ideas of others.

If television's a babysitter, the Internet is a drunk librarian who won't shut up.

...There are almost as many kinds of libraries as there are kinds of readers.

It took a bit of popcorn and a library snack bar to make me realize that being a librarian was about more than just giving people information. It was about serving a community. And if the community is hungry for more than just knowledge, then maybe it__ about time to open a snack bar.

Libraries, whether my own or shared with a greater reading public, have always seemed to me pleasantly mad places, and for as long as I can remember I've been seduced by their labyrinthine logic, which suggests that reason (if not art) rules over a cacophonous arrangement of books.

I like to imagine that library school was started because of some sort of silly bar bet where a guy got really plastered and told his buddy that he could convince people that librarians needed to be trained in the art of librarianship. Sadly, this is not the case; its roots are a bit more academic.

The loudest elderly women always had the quietest elderly husbands.

The love of libraries, like most loves, must be learned.

Librarians were like guardian angels, with graying hair and beady eyes, magnified through reading glasses, and always read to recommend new literary windows to gaze through.

The library, like the thrift shop, specialised in the leavings of the elderly dead.

They found the library sadly lacking in texts they could use.