#library

You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do—and they don’t. They have prejudices. They may like Henry James, but what if you don’t want to write like Henry James? They may like John Irving, for instance, who’s the bore of all time. A lot of the people whose work they’ve taught in the schools for the last thirty years, I can’t understand why people read them and why they are taught. The library, on the other hand, has no biases. The information is all there for you to interpret. You don’t have someone telling you what to think. You discover it for yourself. ↗

— Ray Bradbury

#henry-james #john-irving #library #information

He wished he was with his mom in her library, where everything was safe and numbered and organized by the Dewey decimal system. Ben wished the world was organized by the Dewey decimal system. That way you'd be able to find whatever you were looking for, like the meaning of your dream, or your dad. ↗

— Brian Selznick

#dreams #library #dreams

A library could show you everything if you knew where to look. ↗

— Pat Conroy

#library #reading #life

It was an incredible resource. I'd sit with a big stack of bound New Yorkers in the library and read through, especially the 'Talk of the Town' sections. ↗

— Michael Chabon

#bound #especially #i #incredible #library

I always tell people that I became a writer not because I went to school but because my mother took me to the library. I wanted to become a writer so I could see my name in the card catalog. ↗

— Sandra Cisneros

#became #because #become #card #catalog

If anybody wanted to photograph my life, they'd get bored in a day. 'Heres Matt at home learning his lines. Here's Matt researching in aisle six of his local library'. A few hours of that and they'd go home. ↗

— Matt Damon

#anybody #bored #day #few #get

I had plenty of pimples as a kid. One day I fell asleep in the library. When I woke up, a blind man was reading my face. ↗

— Rodney Dangerfield

#blind #blind man #day #face #fell

I've been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library. ↗

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

#been #drunk #i #library #me

For him that stealeth,or borroweth and returneth not,this book from its owner, let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him. Let him be struck with palsy, and all his members blasted. Let him languish in pain, crying aloud for mercy, and let there be no surcease to this agony till he sing in dissolution. Let bookworms gnaw his entrails in token of the worm that dieth not, and when at last he goeth to his last punishment, let the flames of hell consume him for ever. Curse on book thieves, from the monastery of San Pedro, Barcelona, Spain ↗

— Cornelia Funke

#library #malediction #change

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