#libraries

In my fool hardy youth, when my friends were dreaming of heroic deeds in the realms of engineering and law, finance and national politics, I dreamt of becoming a librarian. ↗

— Alberto Manguel

#librarian #libraries #library #dreams

Library? That sounded reasonable. As my thoughts revolved around my days surrounded by books, something miraculous happened. My anger subsided. It ebbed away as the thoughts of books, pages, and comfort entered my head. ↗

— Rebecca Maizel

#vampires #anger

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. ↗

— Alberto Manguel

#library #art

(about organizing books in his home library, and putting a book in the "Arts and Lit non-fiction section) I personally find that for domestic purposes, the Trivial Pursuit system works better than Dewey. ↗

— Nick Hornby

#home #libraries #organization #art

I love vast libraries; yet there is a doubt, If one be better with them or without, Unless he use them wisely, and, indeed, Knows the high art of what and how to read. ↗

— John Godfrey Saxe

#libraries #reading #art

It’s always the end of the world,” said Russell Grandinetti, one of Amazon’s top executives. “You could set your watch on it arriving.” He pointed out, though, that the landscape was in some ways changing for the first time since Gutenberg invented the modern book nearly 600 years ago. “The only really necessary people in the publishing process now are the writer and reader,” he said. “Everyone who stands between those two has both risk and opportunity.” Amazon Signs Up Authors, Writing Publishers Out of Deal. New York Times, 10/16/2011 ↗

— Russell Grandinetti

#e-books #libraries #publishing #change

To be a librarian is not to be neutral, or passive, or waiting for a question. It is to be a radical positive change agent within your community. ↗

— R. David Lankes

#community #librarians #libraries #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

Choosing a new book was like looking for treasure. ↗

— Kit Pearson

#libraries #dreams

There’s a tendency to resort to romantic cliche when talking about libraries; clearly in a digital age they aren’t a “sexy” alternative. Maybe I’m old-fashioned but I still believe that the core of libraries will always be printed words rather than screens or keyboards. In any town or city, you can walk in and pick up the works of TS Eliot or Brett Easton Ellis, extremes of taste that you can dip into and thumb through without having anyone nudging you to make a purchase. There really aren’t many things in life that can enrich you for free yet ask for nothing in return. ↗

— Nicky Wire

#age