Alicewilts > Alicewilts's Quotes

“Our ignorance allowed us to live, as you are in the mountains, and your rope is frayed and about to break, but you don't know it and feel safe.”
― Primo Levi, The Periodic Table

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
― Theodore Roosevelt

“Hate does that. Burns off everything but itself, so whatever your grievance is, your face looks just like your enemy's.”
― Toni Morrison, Love

“People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.”
― Saul Bellow

“Libraries are our friends.”
― Neil Gaiman

“When I got [my] library card, that was when my life began.”
― Rita Mae Brown

“I like libraries. It makes me feel comfortable and secure to have walls of words, beautiful and wise, all around me. I always feel better when I can see that there is something to hold back the shadows.”
― Roger Zelazny, Nine Princes in Amber

“[Public] libraries should be open to all—except the censor.

[Response to questionnaire in Saturday Review, October 29 1960]”
― John F. Kennedy

“Libraries really are wonderful. They're better than bookshops, even. I mean bookshops make a profit on selling you books, but libraries just sit there lending you books quietly out of the goodness of their hearts.”
― Jo Walton, Among Others

“You see, I don't belive that libraries should be drab places where people sit in silence, that has been the main reason for our policy of employing wild animals as librarians.”
― Monty Python

“Libraries raised me.”
― Ray Bradbury

“A great library doesn't have to be big or beautiful. It doesn't have to have the best facilities or the most efficient staff or the most users. A great library provides. It is enmeshed in the life of a community in a way that makes it indispensable. A great library is one nobody notices because it is always there, and always has what people need.”
― Vicki Myron, Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World

“Congratulations on the new library, because it isn't just a library. It is a space ship that will take you to the farthest reaches of the Universe, a time machine that will take you to the far past and the far future, a teacher that knows more than any human being, a friend that will amuse you and console you -- and most of all, a gateway, to a better and happier and more useful life.

[Letters of Note; Troy (MI, USA) Public Library, 1971]”
― Isaac Asimov

“The library is like a candy store where everything is free.”
― Jamie Ford, Songs of Willow Frost

“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.”
― John Jakes, Homeland

“A library outranks any other one thing a community can do to benefit its people. It is a never failing spring in the desert.”
― Andrew Carnegie

“Nothing is pleasanter to me than exploring in a library.”
― Walter Savage Landor, Pericles and Aspasia

“Libraries are a force for good. They wear capes. They fight evil. They don’t get upset when you don’t send them a card on their birthdays. (Though they will charge you if you’re late returning a book.) They serve communities. The town without a library is a town without a soul. The library card is a passport to wonders and miracles, glimpses into other lives, religions, experiences, the hopes and dreams and strivings of ALL human beings, and it is this passport that opens our eyes and hearts to the world beyond our front doors, that is one of our best hopes against tyranny, xenophobia, hopelessness, despair, anarchy, and ignorance. Libraries are the torch of the world, illuminating the path when it feels too dark to see. We mustn’t allow that torch to be extinguished.”
― Libba Bray

“Every reader his or her book.
Every book its reader.”
― S.R. Ranganathan

“Shout for libraries. Shout for the young readers who use them.”
― Patrick Ness

“What is more important to a library than anything else -- than everything else -- is the fact that it exists."

[The Premise Of Meaning, American Scholar; Washington, DC, June 5, 1972]”
― Archibald MacLeish

“Libraries have always been there for me. Of course I'll stand up for them.”
― Marilyn Johnson

“A library should fill our leisure with adventure. It is a refuge from the commonplace and the dull, a sanctuary where all the trials, the tribulations, and the boredoms of the outer world are forbidden and where such an evil thing as a tax-collector may be forgotten and, peradventure, forgiven.”
― E. Norman Torry, Round My Library Fire: A Book about Books

“Civilized nations build libraries; lands that have lost their soul close them down.”
― Toby Forward

“There's so much proscription in the lives of young people, and it's so vital to have a place that says, look, here are the doors onto the world and amazingly, you're free to choose any one you like. - Patrick Ness on Libraries”
― Patrick Ness

“Welcome young poet, in here you are free
to follow your star to where you should be.

That door of the library was the door into me
And Lorca and Shelley said “Come to the feast.”
Whitechapel Library, Aldgate East.”
― Bernard Kops

“A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It's where the rich use public transportation.”
― Gustavo Petro

“Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“At the beginning, there had been talk of using some of her money to start a home for alcoholics. In a sense they had succeeded.”
― Edward St. Aubyn, Never Mind

“No, he mustn't think about it, or indeed about anything, and especially not about heroin, because heroin was the one thing that really worked, the only thing that stopped him scampering around in a hamster's wheel of unanswerable questions. Heroin was the cavalry. Heroin was the missing chair leg, made with such precision that it matched every splinter of the break. Heroin landed purring at the base of his skull, and wrapped itself darkly around his nervous system, like a black cat curling up on its favourite cushion. It was as soft and rich as the throat of a wood pigeon, or the splash of sealing wax onto a page, or a handful of gems slipping from palm to palm.”
― Edward St. Aubyn, Bad News