#libraries

But the central branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library was still a place of wonders to Tess, even if the book budget had been slashed and the hours cut. Her parents had made a lot of mistakes, a fact Tess compulsively shared on first dates, but she gave them credit for doing one thing right: Starting when she was eight, they gave her a library card and dropped her off at the downtown Pratt every Saturday while they shopped. Twenty-one years later, Tess still entered through the children's entrance on the side, pausing to toss a penny in the algae-coated fish pond, then climbing the stairs to the main hall. If she could be married here, she would. ↗

— Laura Lippman

#dating

The Poet at the Breakfast Table: 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. ↗

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

#series #experience

THOMASINA: But then the Egyptian noodle made carnal embrace with the enemy who burned the great library of Alexandria without so much as a fine for all that is overdue! ↗

— Tom Stoppard

#humor #libraries #thomasina #humor

CREATION The library is not a shrine for the worship of books. It is not a temple where literary incense must be burned or where one's devotion to the bound book is expressed in ritual. A library, to modify the famous metaphor of Socrates, should be the delivery room for the birth of ideas - a place where history comes to life. — Cited in ALA Bulletin, Oct. 1954, p.475 Norman COUSINS (1915- ) ↗

— Cousins

#life

What has been happening the last four years in City Hall is that they have been closing recreation centers, closing libraries. We have not looked after our children in City Hall. ↗

— Carl Stokes

#been #centers #children #city #city hall

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. ↗

— Mark Twain

#books #libraries #wisdom #wisdom

The library in summer is the most wonderful thing because there you get books on any subject and read them each for only as long as they hold your interest, abandoning any that don't, halfway or a quarter of the way through if you like, and store up all that knowledge in the happy corners of your mind for your own self and not to show off how much you know or spit it back at your teacher on a test paper. ↗

— Polly Horvath

#libraries #reading #summer #self-knowledge

About the library," he whispered. He took out the pencil stub from his pocket and poised it over the page. Will you write like Mr. Blake or like yourself?" I inquired. He wrote and whispered the words aloud as he did. "I am in the library. It smells like old stuff." It smells familiar," I suggested. "It smells like words." Because his left side was to me, I couldn't easily take his hand to write. Books are boring," James said as he wrote. They line the walls like a thousand leather doorways to be opened into worlds unknown," I offered. He thought about this and then wrote with a smile, "I hate books." From A Certain Slant of Light ↗

— Laura Whitcomb

#libraries #young-adult-fiction #young-adult-fiction

Shout for libraries. Shout for the young readers who use them. ↗

— Patrick Ness

#libraries #thoughtful #inspirational

Libraries are where it all begins. ↗

— Rita Dove

#libraries #where