#libra

I cannot sufficiently celebrate the glorious liberty that reigns in the public libraries of the twentieth century as compared with the intolerable management of those of the nineteenth century, in which the books were jealously railed away from the people, and obtainable only at an expenditure of time and red tape calculated to discourage any ordinary taste for literature. ↗

— Edward Bellamy

#customer-service #library #library-books #change

life is full of calibration ↗

— Aditia Rinaldi

#change #life #change

Just as we may, through an appalled realization that we were unaware of what was going on in the mind of one we thought we knew, come to wonder how we ever know what another person is thinking or feeling, so too we may, having on some occasion wanted badly to understand and having clearly failed, come to wonder how we ever manage to understand, and how we know that we have succeeded. ↗

— Patrick Wilson

#communication #connections #inquiry #libraries #understanding

Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treausre of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors. ↗

— Umberto Eco

#library #literature #reading #words #death

I like to imagine that, on the day after my last, my library and I will crumble together, so that even when I am no more I'll still be with my books. ↗

— Alberto Manguel

#death #library #death

Please bury me in the library With a dozen long-stemmed proses ↗

— J. Patrick Lewis

#death #library #reading #death

I won't be sad too often, If they bury me in the library With bookworms in my coffin. ↗

— J. Patrick Lewis

#death #library #reading #death

Just like old librarians, old coins are often more valuable than they appear at face value. ↗

— Kate Klise

#librarians #death

There's a serendipity to real life that the Internet can't duplicate. Do you use the library? For anything? Well, sometimes you end up picking up the book next to the one you were looking for, and it's that book that changes your life. ↗

— Laura Lippman

#library-books #library-in-the-digital-age #age

We can imagine the books we'd like to read, even if they have not yet been written, and we can imagine libraries full of books we would like to possess, even if they are well beyond our reacher, because we enjoy dreaming up a library that reflects every one of our interests and every one of our foibles--a library that, in its variety and complexity, fully reflects the reader we are. ↗

— Alberto Manguel

#dream #dreaming #library #reader #reading