Thursday Thirteen 284: National Library Week

April 14-20, 2013 is National Library Week. To celebrate, here are thirteen quotes about libraries.


01. “My alma mater was books, a good library. . . . I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity.”
― Malcolm X


02. “I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! -- When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice


03. “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


04. “A good library will never be too neat, or too dusty, because somebody will always be in it, taking books off the shelves and staying up late reading them.”
― Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid


05. “My library is an archive of longings.”
― Susan Sontag, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980


06. “Whatever the cost of our libraries, the price is cheap compared to that of an ignorant nation.”
― Walter Cronkite


07. “All the books we own, both read and unread, are the fullest expression of self we have at our disposal. ... But with each passing year, and with each whimsical purchase, our libraries become more and more able to articulate who we are, whether we read the books or not.”
― Nick Hornby, The Polysyllabic Spree


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


09. “My grandma always said that God made libraries so that people didn't have any excuse to be stupid.”
― Joan Bauer, Rules of the Road


10. “Libraries will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no libraries.”
― Anne Herbert


11. “Don't join the book burners. Don't think you're going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book . . .”
― Dwight D. Eisenhower


12. “The library is inhabited by spirits that come out of the pages at night.”
― Isabel Allende


13. “Cram your head with characters and stories. Abuse your library privileges. Never stop looking at the world, and never stop reading to find out what sense other people have made of it. If people give you a hard time and tell you to get your nose out of a book, tell them you're working. Tell them it's research. Tell them to pipe down and leave you alone.”
― Jennifer Weiner



Linking to: Thursday Thirteen