c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
I don't like people much, and I like doctors even less.
— Star Trek: The Next Generation Episode Guide Team, STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION EPISODE GUIDE: Details All 178 Episodes with Plot Summaries. Searchable. Companion to DVDs, Blu Ray and Box Set
Now that Karen has been resurrected, I can travel beyond the black mirror. I can discover who I have lost with thefloating hearts and severed heads of my medicine. I must now whisper my other friends back too. I’m sad they’re gone…sad and blue.
— Nicholaus Patnaude, First Aide Medicine
When speaking of the mighty Andes and the so-called "eyebrows" country at the range's eastern base- the Tropical Wet Forest region-I am first obliged to give homage to the Apu, the Mountain Lords, the ice-capped everlasting sovereigns of these great lands, on whose forested slopes manifests the most marvelous biological diversity.
— Jonathon Miller Weisberger, Rainforest Medicine: Preserving Indigenous Science and Biodiversity in the Upper Amazon
The Secoya are trapped between the devastating effects of the colonization frontier and their rich traditional past, which is proving to be as fragile a reality and as fleeting a memory as the most powerful visions of their esoteric science. But instead of detailing that sad scene, in this chapter I have attempted to portray my image of this culture as I see it in its fading colors, magic, and awe-inspiring mystery.
— Jonathon Miller Weisberger, Rainforest Medicine: Preserving Indigenous Science and Biodiversity in the Upper Amazon
Among the Secoya, clear guidelines regulate preparation of the medicine. They are adamant about this preparation method and insist that the guidelines be followed. I've already discussed some fundamentals of harvesting the plants. When respected, all the elements and subtle factors combine to make a potent and efficacious medicine, necessary for a positive and healing ceremony.
— Jonathon Miller Weisberger, Rainforest Medicine: Preserving Indigenous Science and Biodiversity in the Upper Amazon
If science is defined or understood as a mode of seeking knowledge, a means of interpreting nature in a way that can be demonstrated to others, then the plant-medicine traditions of the Amazon as they have been practiced constitute an authentic scientific discipline.
— Jonathon Miller Weisberger, Rainforest Medicine: Preserving Indigenous Science and Biodiversity in the Upper Amazon
Psychiatry is a strange field because, unlike any other field of medicine, you never really finish. Your greatest instrument is you, yourself, and the work of self-understanding is endless. I'm still learning.
— Irvin D. Yalom, The Spinoza Problem
You see, when medicine works, it is blessed science, and when it fails, it is witchcraft. - Polidori
— Kenneth Oppel, This Dark Endeavor
The doctors found out that Bunbury could not live, that is what I mean - so Bunbury died.He seems to have had great confidence in the opinion of his physicians. I am glad, however, that he made up his mind at the last to some definite course of action, and acted under proper medical advice.
— Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
The possibilities and probabilities are all we have to work with in medicine, though. What we are drawn to in this imperfect science, what we in fact covet in our way, is the alterable moment-the fragile but crystalline opportunity for one's know-how, ability, or just gut instinct to change the course of another's life for the better.
— Atul Gawande, Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science
First do no harm. -HippocratesSecond, do some good. -Anne M. Lipton, M.D., Ph.D.
— Anne M. Lipton, The Common Sense Guide to Dementia for Clinicians and Caregivers
A little toxin is the best tonic.
— David P. Gontar
At the very dawn of history, the care of the sick was actually superior to what the great majority of mankind receive today when ill.
— Herbert M. Shelton, Rubies in the Sand
A modern hospital is like Grand Central Station—all noise and hubbub, and is filled with smoking physicians, nurses, orderlies, patients and visitors. Soft drinks are sold on each floor and everybody guzzles these popular poisons. The stench of chemicals offends the nose, while tranquillizers substitute for quietness.
— Herbert M. Shelton, Rubies in the Sand
Darwinism gives no moral guidelines about how we should live or how doctors should practice medicine. A Darwinian perspective on medicine can, however, help us to understand the evolutionary origins of disease, and this knowledge will prove profoundly useful in achieving the legitimate goals of medicine.
— Randolph M. Nesse, Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine
I have always understood that money made in the patent medicine business is a practical bar to social success.
— George Presbury Rowell, Forty years an advertising agent, 1865-1905
Those who do scientific or medical studies and have conclusions are reflecting the results preferred by those who pay them.
— Richard Diaz
My top priority is for people to understand that they have the power to change things themselves.
— Aung San Suu Kyi
I love the imagery of struggle. I sometimes wish I were suffering in a good cause, or risking my life for the good of others, instead of just being a gravely endangered patient. Allow me to inform you, though, that when you sit in a room with a set of other finalists, and kindly people bring a huge transparent bag of poison and plug it into your arm, and you either read or don't read a book while the venom sack gradually empties itself into your system, the image of the ardent solider is the very last one that will occur to you. You feel swamped with passivity and impotence: dissolving in powerlessness like a sugar lump in water.
— Christopher Hitchens, Mortality
In the spring of 2009, I was the 217th person ever to be diagnosed with anti-NMDA-receptor autoimmune encephalitis. Just a year later, that figure had doubled. Now the number is in the thousands. Yet Dr. Bailey, considered one of the best neurologists in the country, had never heard of it. When we live in a time when the rate of misdiagnoses has shown no improvement since the 1930s, the lesson here is that it’s important to always get a second opinion.While he may be an excellent doctor in many respects, Dr. Bailey is also, in some ways, a perfect example of what is wrong with medicine. I was just a number to him (and if he saw thirty-five patients a day, as he told me, that means I was one of a very large number). He is a by-product of a defective system that forces neurologists to spend five minutes with X number of patients a day to maintain their bottom line. It’s a bad system. Dr. Bailey is not the exception to the rule. He is the rule.
— Susannah Cahalan, Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness
Are doctors who make mistakes villains? No, because then we all are.
— Atul Gawande, Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance
I have noticed that doctors who fail in the practice of medicine have a tendency to seek one another's company and aid in consultation.
— Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
Physicians, patients, and ethicists must also understand that acknowledging abuse and encouraging African Americans to participate in research are compatible goals. History and today's deplorable African American health profile tell us clearly that black Americans need both more research and more vigilance.
— Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present
One of the first things we teach medical students is to listen to the patient by taking a careful medical history. Ninety percent of the time, you can arrive at an uncannily accurate diagnosis by paying close attention, using physical examination and sophisticated lab test to confirm your hunch (and to increase the bill to the insurance company).
— V.S. Ramachandran, The Tell–Tale Brain – A Neuroscientist`s Quest for What Makes Us Human
Doctors tend to enter the arenas of their profession's practice with a brisk good cheer that they have to then stop and try to mute a bit when the arena they're entering is a hospital's fifth floor, a psych ward, where brisk good cheer would amount to a kind of gloating. This is why doctors on psych wards so often wear a vaguely fake frown of puzzled concentration, if and when you see them in fifth-floor halls. And this is why a hospital M.D.--who's usually hale and pink-cheeked and poreless, and who almost always smells unusually clean and good--approaches any psych patient under this care with a professional manner somewhere between bland and deep, a distant but sincere concern that's divided evenly between the patient's subjective discomfort and the hard facts of the case.
— David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
[American ambulance crews] salvaged people we'd never see in Missing, because no one would have tied to bring them to a hospital. Judging someone to be beyond help never crossed the minds of police, firemen, or doctors here.
— Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone
It is an odd thing that you can easily get millions of pounds for weapons to destroy life, but it is exceedingly difficult to get thousands for weapons to preserve it.
— James Harpole, Leaves From A Surgeon's Case-Book
Homeopathy is the safest and more reliable approach to ailments and has withstood the assaults of established medical practice for over 100 years
— Yehudi Menuhin
Philosophy is a bitter medicine with many fearsome side effects, but if you are able to stomach it, it can cure your soul of the many ills and infirmities of ignorance. Given the choice, most men prefer not to take it, and many of those who do soon find that they cannot carry on with it. In the end, they choose what is more pleasant over what is more wholesome, and prefer the society of those who encourage them in their follies to that of those who admonish and improve them. You, on the other hand, appear to be minded otherwise, for when a young men sets for himself the highest standards of education and conduct, he naturally shuns the company of mindless nobodies and boldly seeks out that of the singular men who are prepared to teach him and challenge him and exhort him to virtue. In time, by his strivings, he will come to realize that it is from the hardest toil and noblest deeds that the purest and most persisting pleasures are to be had, and, taking pity on other men, and thinking also of the gods, he will do everything in his power to share this precious secret.
— Neel Burton, Plato: Letters to my Son
In more ancient times the life was simpler, but now the discovery of all these different medicines for curing dyspepsia shows that people are suffering from this disease. In this country we know that there are so many kinds of pills and medicines used. We even have those in India now. These things show that not only in America but in all the countries of the world we have to recourse to artificial means for necessary nutrients because people are not aware of right rules of diet. It is better to follow the right rules of diet in the beginning in order to avoid any kind of artificial medicines later on.
— Virchand Gandhi
Certainly the primary imperative of a physician is to be skilled in medical science, but if he or she does not probe a patient's soul, then the doctor's care is given without caring, and part of the sacred mission of healing is missing.
— Jerome Groopman
I am not sure,' Mordecai told Thomas, 'whether omens can be trusted.''Of course they can.''I should like to hear your reasons. But show me your urine first.''You said I was cured,' Thomas protested. 'Eternal vigilance, dear Thomas, is the price of health. Piss for me.
— Bernard Cornwell, Vagabond
..I don't count Jennifer among my mistakes. She had a severe infection and precious little reserve. Nevertheless, I think of her often. Those minutes of terror and confusion I felt standing powerless in her room served as a visceral reminder throughout my training... that the big picture isn't enough in medicine...
— Lisa Sanders, Every Patient Tells a Story: Medical Mysteries and the Art of Diagnosis
Before the counter-culture revolutionary Li Lian was executed in 1971 for criticising the Cultural Revolution, pour policemen pushed her face against the window of a truck, lifted her shirt and cut out her kidneys with a surgical knife,’ Mau Sen said, his face stony and white. ‘I think that removing the organs of convicts while they are still alive is too much. It completely contravenes medical ethics.’ ‘This is a dissection class, not a political meeting,’ Sun Chunlin said.
— Ma Jian, Beijing Coma
I'm sorry, 'herbal medicine', "Oh, herbal medicine's been around for thousands of years!" Indeed it has, and then we tested it all, and the stuff that worked became 'medicine'. And the rest of it is just a nice bowl of soup and some potpourri, so knock yourselves out.
— Dara Ó Briain
The striking thing is that WHO doesn't really have the authority to do any of this. It can't tell governments what to do. It hires no vaccinators, distributes no vaccine. It is a small Geneva bureaucracy run by several hundred international delegates whose annual votes tell the organization what to do but not how to do it.…The only substantial resource that WHO has cultivated is information and expertise.
— Atul Gawande, Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance
Harry — I think I've just understood something! I've got to go to the library!”And she sprinted away, up the s
— J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
A university is just a group of buildings gathered around a library.
— Shelby Foote
The only thing that you absolutely have to know, is the location of the library.
— Albert Einstein
Because I'm the kind of girl who fantasizes about being trapped in a library overnight.
— Rainbow Rowell, Fangirl
Your library is your paradise.
— Erasmus
What in the world would we do without our libraries?
— Katharine Hepburn
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
— Cornelia Funke, Inkheart
If television's a babysitter, the Internet is a drunk librarian who won't shut up.
— Dorothy Gambrell, Cat and Girl Volume I
A library in the middle of a community is a cross between an emergency exit, a life-raft and a festival. They are cathedrals of the mind; hospitals of the soul; theme parks of the imagination. On a cold rainy island, they are the only sheltered public spaces where you are not a consumer, but a citizen instead
— Caitlin Moran
A public library is the most democratic thing in the world. What can be found there has undone dictators and tyrants: demagogues can persecute writers and tell them what to write as much as they like, but they cannot vanish what has been written in the past, though they try often enough...People who love literature have at least part of their minds immune from indoctrination. If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.
— Doris Lessing
I always get lost in the library,' he said, 'no matter how many times I go. In fact, I think I get lost there more, the more that I go. Like it's getting to know me and revealing new passages.
— Rainbow Rowell, Fangirl
When you are growing up there are two institutional places that affect you most powerfully: the church, which belongs to God, and the public library, which belongs to you.
— Keith Richards
When I tell people I went to library school, the most common reaction is either “You’re joking, right?” or “They have schools for librarians? Do they teach you how to properly sssh people?
— Scott Douglas
The library is the worst group of people ever assembled in history. They're mean, conniving, rude, and extremely well-read, which makes them dangerous.
— Leslie Knope
I cannot comprehend the neglect of a family library in such days as these."- Mr. Darcy
— Jane Austen, Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Persuasion
Because that's what Hermione does,' said Ron, shrugging. 'When in doubt, go to the library.
— J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
Nothing is more impotent than an unread library.
— John Waters, Role Models
Now take my hand and hold it tight.I will not fail you here tonight,For failing you, I fail myselfAnd place my soul upon a shelfIn Hell's library without light.I will not fail you here tonight.
— Dean Koontz, The Book Of Counted Sorrows
The love of libraries, like most loves, must be learned. 
— Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night
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
The secret of a good librarian is that he never reads anything more of the literature in his charge than the title and the table of contents. Anyone who lets himself go and starts reading a book is lost as a librarian...He's bound to lose perspective.
— Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities
It took a bit of popcorn and a library snack bar to make me realize that being a librarian was about more than just giving people information. It was about serving a community. And if the community is hungry for more than just knowledge, then maybe it’s about time to open a snack bar.
— Scott Douglas
Perhaps no place in any community is so totally democratic as the town library. The only entrance requirement is interest.
— Claudia Alta Johnson
Corliss wondered what happens to a book that sits unread on a library shelf for thirty years. Can a book rightfully be called a book if it never gets read?...'How many books never get checked out," Corliss asked the librarian. 'Most of them,' she said.Corliss never once considered the fate of library books. She loved books. How could she not worry about the unread? She felt like a disorganized scholar, an abusive mother, and a cowardly soldier.'Are you serious?' Corliss asked. 'What are we talking about here? If you were guessing, what is the percentage of books in this library that never get checked out?' 'We're talking sixty percent of them. Seriously. Maybe seventy percent. And I'm being optimistic. It's probably more like eighty or ninety percent. This isn't a library, it's an orphanage.'The librarian talked in a reverential whisper. Corliss knew she'd misjudged this passionate woman. Maybe she dressed poorly, but she was probably great in bed, certainly believed in God and goodness, and kept an illicit collection of overdue library books on her shelves.
— Sherman Alexie, Ten Little Indians
A library after closing is a lonely place. It is heart-poundingly silent, and the rows of shelves create an almost unfathomable number of dark and creepy corners.
— Vicki Myron
We don’t have to destroy the library of the past. We just need to give it a face-lift.
— Scott Douglas
Joss's ears perked up. He loved libraries. Nowhere else in the world felt so safe and homey. Nowhere else smelled like books and dust and happy solitude quite like a library did.
— Heather Brewer, First Kill
First paycheck I get, I thought, I'm going to get myself a room near the downtown L.A. Public Library.
— Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye
I like to imagine that library school was started because of some sort of silly bar bet where a guy got really plastered and told his buddy that he could convince people that librarians needed to be trained in the art of librarianship. Sadly, this is not the case; its roots are a bit more academic.
— Scott Douglas
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, The Library at Night
The loudest elderly women always had the quietest elderly husbands.
— Scott Douglas
...killing rats wasn’t in my job description.
— Scott Douglas
Entering a library, I am always stuck by the way in which a certain vision of the world is imposed upon the reader through its categories and its order.
— Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night
A library was nothing without its people. You say library and there’s this iconoclastic image of an old-lady librarian telling people to be quiet and not to run. But the thing was, that lady—that iconoclastic lady—was with us when we cleaned. She wore blue jeans, too. Maybe she was what people thought about when you said library, but she didn’t make the library. People made the library. That’s what made a library. Without them, all the sacredness was gone. It was just a building with books.
— Scott Douglas
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
A library doesn't need windows. A library is a window.
— Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built
There’s something deep in the heart of every person that wantsto protect culture. The only thing about my pending career thatwas changed because of 9/11 was that I began to see it was the community,not the librarian, that was important to the library. Librarianswere only as important as the community they inspired. If Iwas going to continue with this career, my job wouldn’t be to protectinformation, it would be to bring the community together andinspire them to appreciate everything a library stands for.
— Scott Douglas
Touching him, kissing him, was like having a fever all over again. I was on fire. My body burned. The world burned. Sparks flew. Against his mouth, I moaned.There was a POP! and CRACK!The smell of burned plastic filled the cubicle. We pulled apart, breathing heavily. Over his shoulder I saw thin strips of smoke wafting from the top of the ancient monitor. Good God, was this going to happen every time we kissed?
— Jennifer L. Armentrout, Onyx
I was under the librarians' protection. Civil servants and servants of civility, they had my back. They would be whatever they needed to be that day: information professionals, teachers, police, community organizers, computer technicians, historians, confidantes, clerks, social workers, storytellers, or, in this case, guardians of my peace.
— Marilyn Johnson, This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All
He snatched the book from me and replaced it hastily on its shelf, muttering that if one brick was removed the whole library was liable to collapse.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Mr. O'Donnell was at the library counter, performing the sort of grim rituals librarians perform with index cards and stumpy pencils and those rubber stamps with columns of rotating numbers. "Ms. Auerbach! What will it be today? Camus? Cervantes?" "Actually I'm looking for a book of poetry by Emily Dickinson"He paused somberly, toying with the twirled tip of his mustache. No matter how seriously librarians are engaged in their work, they are always glad to be interrupted when the theme is books. It makes no difference to them how simple the search is or how behind on time either of you might be running - they consider all queries scrupulously. They love to have their knowledge tested. They lie in wait, they will not be rushed.
— Hilary Thayer Hamann, Anthropology of an American Girl
That would make it the fifth time since I'd started working at the university that I'd thrown someone out of one of those rooms for inappropriate behavior. And they say a library is a boring place to work.
— Samantha Young, Before Jamaica Lane
Th' first thing to have in a libry is a shelf.Fr'm time to time this can be decorated with lithrachure.But th' shelf is th' main thing.
— Finley Peter Dunne, Mr. Dooley Says
During the day, the library is a realm of order.
— Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night
To be great at something, you must look to the great ones of thepast and improve on the ideas and techniques that they started. Iwas motivated to do better—to improve on the ideas of others.
— Scott Douglas
I am a librarian. I discovered me in the library. I went to find me in the library. Before I fell in love with libraries, I was just a six-year-old boy. The library fueled all of my curiosities, from dinosaurs to ancient Egypt. When I graduated from high school in 1938, I began going to the library three nights a week. I did this every week for almost ten years and finally, in 1947, around the time I got married, I figured I was done. So I graduated from the library when I was twenty-seven. I discovered that the library is the real school.
— Ray Bradbury
Why can't I just Google it like everything else?! I hate you public library system!
— Vera Brosgol, Anya's Ghost
When rivers flooded, when fire fell from the sky, what a fine place the library was, the many rooms, the books. With luck, no one found you. How could they!--when you were off to Tanganyika in '98, Cairo in 1812, Florence in 1492!?
— Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes
There's a serendipity to real life that the Internet can't duplicate. Do you use the library? For anything? Well, sometimes you end up picking up the book next to the one you were looking for, and it's that book that changes your life.
— Laura Lippman, Hardly Knew Her
I’m completely library educated. I’ve never been to college. I went down to the library when I was in grade school in Waukegan, and in high school in Los Angeles, and spent long days every summer in the library. I used to steal magazines from a store on Genesee Street, in Waukegan, and read them and then steal them back on the racks again. That way I took the print off with my eyeballs and stayed honest. I didn’t want to be a permanent thief, and I was very careful to wash my hands before I read them. But with the library, it’s like catnip, I suppose: you begin to run in circles because there’s so much to look at and read. And it’s far more fun than going to school, simply because you make up your own list and you don’t have to listen to anyone. When I would see some of the books my kids were forced to bring home and read by some of their teachers, and were graded on—well, what if you don’t like those books?
— Ray Bradbury
Lord Peter's library was one of the most delightful bachelor rooms in London. Its scheme was black and primrose; its walls were lined with rare editions, and its chairs and Chesterfield sofa suggested the embraces of the houris. In one corner stood a black baby grand, a wood fire leaped on a wide old-fashioned hearth, and the Sèvres vases on the chimneypiece were filled with ruddy and gold chrysanthemums. To the eyes of the young man who was ushered in from the raw November fog it seemed not only rare and unattainable, but friendly and familiar, like a colourful and gilded paradise in a mediæval painting
— Dorothy L. Sayers, Whose Body?
‎"Since I could only take six books per visit from the library, I had to time it right, or I'd be stuck on Sundays rereading the five Reader's Digest Condensed Books sitting on our red laquered living room shelf.
— Randy Susan Meyers, The Murderer's Daughters
Until one morning, one of the coldest mornings of the year, when I came in with the book cart and found Jean Hollis Clark, a fellow librarian, standing dead still in the middle of the staff room."I heard a noise from the drop box," Jean said."What kind of noise?""I think it's an animal.""A what?""An animal," Jean said. "I think there's an animal in the drop box."That was when I heard it, a low rumble from under the metal cover. It didn't sound like an animal. It sounded like an old man clearing his throat.Gurr-gug-gug. Gurr-gug-gug.But the opening at the top of the chute was only a few inches wide, so that would be quite a squeeze for an old man. It had to be an animal. But what kind? I got down on my knees, reached over the lid, and hoped for a chipmunk.What I got instead was a blast of freezing air. The night before, the temperature had reached minus fifteen degrees, and that didn't take into account the wind, which cut under your coat and squeezed your bones. And on that night, of all nights, someone had jammed a book into return slot, wedging it open. It was as cold in the box as it was outside, maybe colder, since the box was lined with metal. It was the kind of cold that made it almost painful to breathe.I was still catching my breath, in fact, when I saw the kitten huddled in the front left corner of the box. It was tucked up in a little space underneath a book, so all I could see at first was its head. It looked grey in the shadows, almost like a little rock, and I could tell its fur was dirty and tangled. Carefully, I lifted the book. The kitten looked up at me, slowly and sadly, and for a second I looked straight into its huge golden eyes. The it lowered its head and sank back down into its hole.At that moment, I lost every bone in my body and just melted.
— Vicki Myron, Dewey the Library Cat: A True Story
But then his parents changed. A year of California had changed them. They stopped sending money. Greg was forced to go out into the world, to interact with real people. And he was glad of this. He had always wanted to be a normal person. To be at ease in society. He had just been too scared to try. But now he was forced to, and so he did–he went and got a job at the public library. He was not quite a librarian, but close. Greg was a shelver. There would be carts of books to shelve, then there would be no more carts of books to shelve, then there would be carts of books to shelve.As a shelver, Greg felt that life was passing him by in a slow and distant, but massive, way–like the moon.
— Tao Lin, Bed
The patron gets comfortable in bed and opens up the book -- it opens tentatively -- and the patron bends the open book backward until there is a satisfying crack and the book is a little more supple, a little easier to read. The book spine has just been broken, and a broken spine means a more submissive book.
— Don Borchert
Plenty of patrons had asked me strange things, but this was the first who asked me where my car was parked. It was almost comical to look at the man, because he actually thought I was going to tell him. I struggled to come up with a reply, but the best I could muster was, "That's personal." What I meant to say was, "Sir, the fact that I work in a public library doesn't make me stupid, it just makes me poor. There's no way I'm going to tell you—a psychotic person who could very well have a knife in his pocket—where I have parked my car.
— Scott Douglas, Quiet, Please: Dispatches From A Public Librarian
The record store was a place of escape. It was a library and a clubhouse” - Cameron Crowe quoted
— Gary Calamar, Record Store Days: From Vinyl to Digital and Back Again
The weight of absence is as much a feature of any library as the constriction of order and space.
— Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night
A good library is a place, a palace where the lofty spirits of all nations and generations meet.
— Samuel Niger
Up steps, three, six, nine, twelve! Slap! Their palms hit the library door. * * * They opened the door and stepped in.They stopped.The library deeps lay waiting for them.Out in the world, not much happened. But here in the special night, a land bricked with paper and leather, anything might happen, always did. Listen! and you heard ten thousand people screaming so high only dogs feathered their ears. A million folk ran toting cannons, sharpening guillotines; Chinese, four abreast marched on forever. Invisible, silent, yes, but Jim and Will had the gift of ears and noses as well as the gift of tongues. This was a factory of spices from far countries. Here alien deserts slumbered. Up front was the desk where the nice old lady, Miss Watriss, purple-stamped your books, but down off away were Tibet and Antarctica, the Congo. There went Miss Wills, the other librarian, through Outer Mongolia, calmly toting fragments of Peiping and Yokohama and the Celebes.
— Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes
The library is not, as some would have it, a place for the retiring of disposition or faint of heart. It is not an ivory tower or a quiet room in a sanitarium facing away from the afternoon sun. It is, rather, a command center, a power base. A board room, a war room. An Oval Office for all who preside over their own destinies. One does not retreat from the world here; one prepares to join it at an advantage.
— Eric Burns, The Joy of Books
Some people write letters, in the library.
— Margaret Atwood, In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination
You build a thousand castles, a thousand sanctuaries, you are nothing; you build a library, you are everything!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
The Bibliotheque du Roi then gives you the closest thing that currently exists to God's understanding of the world.""And yet with a bigger library we could come ever so much closer.
— Neal Stephenson, Quicksilver
Every girl who aspires ultimately to outfit her own home should assemble a library on architectural styles and on furniture both traditional and modern. As few brides can buy expensively illustrated volumes and household equipment simultaneously, a girl should begin asking parents for books early in life, probably while still in the primary grades...
— Johnson O'Connor, The Too Many Aptitude Woman
The International Institute of Islamic Thought and Civilization (ISTAC)... to establish a superior library reflecting the religious and intellectual traditions both of the Islamic and Western civilizations.
— Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas, Islam and Secularism
The porter spends his days in the Library keeping strict vigil over this catacomb of books, passing along between the shelves and yet never paying heed to the almost audible susurrus of desire- the desire every book has to be taken down and read, to live, to come into being in somebody's mind. He even hands the volumes over the counter, seeks them out in their proper places or returns them there without once realising that a Book is a Person and not a Thing.
— W.N.P. Barbellion, The Journal of a Disappointed Man
With a little effort, anything can be shown to connect with anything else: existence is infinitely cross-referenced.
— Martha Cooley, The Archivist
It's like a sealed, forgotten chamber in me; I shan't feel complete until I've discovered its entrance.' 'Sounds like a tomb. Aren't you afraid of what you'll find in there?' 'It's a library; only the stupid and the evil are afraid of those.
— Iain Banks
Public libraries are the sole community centers left in America. The degree to which a branch of the local library is connected to the larger culture is a reflection of the degree to which the community itself is connected to the larger culture.
— Russell Banks
Library stacks from this perspective are not a repository
—  they are a crowd.
There’s a vast fraternity of record collectors, and the record store was their hub. There was not a lot of information on these groups or the labels so you’d gather [there] and it would be like a library. - Lenny Kaye quoted
— Gary Calamar, Record Store Days: From Vinyl to Digital and Back Again
Every library should try to complete on something, if it were only the history of pinheads.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.
She remembered the conversation in the Library, as forgetting was the last thing a fully-trained Librarian should do. Memories were as important as books, and almost as important as proper indexing.
— Genevieve Cogman, The Invisible Library
She did find that the books displayed prominently in every chamber had been dusted, but the spines were pristine and uncreased. They had the sad, untouched air of literature paraded for display purposes but never actually used. It was profoundly depressing.
— Genevieve Cogman, The Invisible Library
Library is direction where wisdom start and ignorance end.
— Abid Hussain Library Officer
Many of my friends think I read books all day and alphabetize the shelves. Well, sometimes I do alphabetize shelves. But more often than not, my job title could be "friend". Or just simply "caring ear." Public librarians are often part information seekers, part social workers.
— Carrie O'Maley, Jack Canfield
Books will give you new ideas to fly and books can be find in the libraries
— Abid Hussain Library Officer
Censors don’t want children exposed to ideas different from their own. If every individual with an agenda had his/her way, the shelves in the school library would be close to empty.
— Judy Blume
Every day, librarians enforce copyright policies that we may disagree with and that, in some ways, run contrary to the values of our profession. Every day, librarians must decide between a desire to preserve the privacy of our community members and offering services our communities demand. Every day, librarians must make a choice between doing what’s easy, doing what’s right, and determining what’s right in the first place. No textbook or mission statement or policy document can relieve us of the necessity to make those decisions, nor remove the complexity of those decisions. That’s why we are librarians and why librarians are professionals, not clerks. That’s why we are stewards within the communities we serve, not servants to them. That’s why we must shape the missions and the work of our organizations and communities, and not simply accept them.
— R. David Lankes, The New Librarianship Field Guide
This sense of possibility might not last, of course Nothing ever did. But she wasn’t going to spoil it by looking too far ahead. They were safe in the Library, and the Library would endure.
— Genevieve Cogman, The Burning Page
The only thing you absolutely have to know, is the location of the library.
— Albert Einstein
Elizabeth laughed and pushed her father's shoulder. "Go, Papa, and be kind to him. I love him so. And it would be to your advantage to be on his good side." Mr. Bennet raised his eyebrows. "Oh, and why is that?" Because I have seen both his libraries in London and at Pemberley, Papa."Interested and amused, Mr. Bennet said, "Ahh, and are they very grand, Lizzy?"A more exquisite sight you will not see," she assured him.
— KaraLynne Mackrory, Bluebells in the Mourning
Nik loved the library, but it went beyond the books; he enjoyed the solitude. In the library, nobody expected him to be strong, or brave, or daring. No need for wrestling to prove he was tougher, no showing teeth to keep other kids from thinking they could get the better of him.
— Liv Rider, Wild City Life
Again, I don't fully understand my emotion response to the library or trust it. It was the site of a series of intellectual revelations that were crucial to me, not just as a student but as a human being.
— Siri Hustvedt, A Plea for Eros: Essays
We are the Library," Coppelia pointed out. "What we don't know, we research.
— Genevieve Cogman, The Invisible Library
How to distract Scorpius from difficult emotional issues? Take him to a library." - Albus Severus Potter
— J.K. Rowling
Everything I am is based on this ugly building on its lonely lawn—lit up during winter darkness; open in the slashing rain—which allowed a girl so poor she didn’t even own a purse to come in twice a day and experience actual magic: traveling through time, making contact with the dead—Dorothy Parker, Stella Gibbons, Charlotte Brontë, Spike Milligan.A library in the middle of a community is a cross be-tween an emergency exit, a life raft and a festival. They are cathedrals of the mind; hospitals of the soul; theme parks of the imagination. On a cold, rainy island, they are the only sheltered public spaces where you are not a consumer, but a citizen, instead. A human with a brain and a heart and a desire to be uplifted, rather than a customer with a credit card and an inchoate “need” for “stuff.” A mall—the shops—are places where your money makes the wealthy wealthier. But a library is where the wealthy’s taxes pay for you to become a little more extraordinary, instead. A satisfying reversal. A balancing of the power.
— Caitlin Moran, Moranthology
Democracy or reading, democracy of space: our public library tradition, wherever we live in the wide world, was incredibly hard-won for us by the generations before us and ought to be protected, not just for ourselves but in the name of every generation after us.
— Ali Smith, Public Library and Other Stories
The only thing that you absolutely have to know, is the location of the library
— Albert Einstein, Quotations by Albert Einstein
There was a grumpy librarian in the library. I could tell that he was the librarian because he seemed to be made of books. I told him that we needed information, and he got us some butterfly nets and sent us up to the top floor of the library.I wondered why we were carrying nets. Valentine didn't know.The book I wanted was pretty obvious. It was called A History of Everything.Finding it was easy. Catching it, however, was not. The moment I reached for it, the whole shelfful of books took off into the air, fluttering like pigeons, and suddenly I knew what the butterfly nets were for.I waved the net about and eventually I caught A History of Everything. As soon as I'd got it, all the rest of the books flapped back to their shelf, all except one, a little red-covered book, which fluttered over my head happily.
— Neil Gaiman, MirrorMask
Interlibrary loans are a wonder of the world and a glory of civilization. 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
They found the library sadly lacking in texts they could use.
— Marge Piercy, Dance the Eagle to Sleep
The library, like the thrift shop, specialised in the leavings of the elderly dead.
— Nell Zink, Mislaid
Bookshelves stood against the four walls. They were shapely and well made, but were all second-hand; Hetty had picked them up on visits to Chesterbourne. She liked her shelves to have personality, as well as the books on them, and thought it would have been simpler to order shelves to be fitted around the room, or to buy those bookcases that grow with the growth of their library, she had stood firm against the amusement of Victor and the irritation of her aunt, and had the shelves she wanted.
— Stella Gibbons
It was immediately clear that the book had been undisturbed for a very long time, perhaps even since it had been laid to rest. The librarian fetched a checked duster, and wiped away the dust, a black, thick, tenacious Victorian dust, a dust composed of smoke and fog particles accumulated before the Clean Air acts.
— A.S. Byatt, Possession
In the room...they are inside the books. They move sometimes within the pages, like sleepers turning over between two dreams.
— Rainer Maria Rilke
What are these things that this houses, Eva?" Rovender picked up a crumbling tome. He handed it to her."These are books," Eva said as the yellowed bits of paper flaked away in her hands to rest on the floor. "It's what humans used to put all of their writing in long ago.
— Tony DiTerlizzi, The Search for WondLa
Your answers lie here," Rovender said, gesturing around the library.
— Tony DiTerlizzi, The Search for WondLa
In prison it must be made rich Library, people must educate their self there. Not to go stupid and more.
— Deyth Banger
He wouldn’t be the one to prove to the world that there was an afterlife, but he hoped to be the one to prove it to himself, though he would have a few stern questions for a Creator who made people haunt libraries.
— Thomm Quackenbush, Flies to Wanton Boys
To make it a crime for public institutions to serve the undocumented simply isolated people and drove them into poverty, she wrote. From then on, people who came looking for a library card received one, regardless of whether their papers were in order.
— Lawrence Hill
They go in not because they need any certain volume but because they feel that there may be some book that needs them.
— Christopher Morley
The only reason I know that is because my mom made it the alarm code at the library,' I quickly explain. 'Oops,' I say, covering my hand with my hand.'Don't worry. I'm not planning on breaking in and stealing any books.
— Leslea Wahl, The Perfect Blindside
Lad, I think we've got what we need for this page. Why don't you go have a look around? And keep out of trouble, or that Madam Sidler will scare you silly." Oskar put a hand to the side of his mouth and lowered his voice. "She's everywhere.""Can I help you?" said Madam Sidler from the corner of the room. Oskar jumped with such violence that his spectacles clattered to the floor. "I heard you mention my name and thought I might be of assistance.""Good heavens, woman!" Oskar exclaimed. "We're fine!
— Andrew Peterson, The Monster in the Hollows
Chance wanting to defend her grandfather, but not about to leave the library, dustysafe sanctuary of shelves and glass cases and the musty smell of all the books, the door locked from the inside against birdnervous aunts who thought maybe a few slabs of smoked ham and a spoonful of mashed potatoes would make everything better, would make anything right again.
— Caitlín R. Kiernan
The life could be unique, incrediable, awesome, irreplaceable and gorgeous. Without "Easy-Peasy", by putting all people to solve puzzles for example. Somebody asks you a question like "Who is Janne WillDrog?" you answer like that "Never had a future, never went to library, never had a chance to be part of the White House. The White Costumed guy knows the answer!" - The find answer you must solve the riddle and to assemble the puzzle!
— Deyth Banger
I mean, public libraries like this one were always short of money, so building even the tiniest of labyrinths had to be beyond their means.
— Haruki Murakami
The atmosphere of the place soothed her automatically; the rich lantern lights, the sheer scent of paper and leather, and the fact that everywhere she looked, there were books, books, beautiful books.
— Genevieve Cogman, The Invisible Library
I love the quietness of the library, the gateway to knowledge, to the French language and medieval history and hydraulic engineering and fairy tales, learning in a very primitive form: books, something that's quickly giving way to modern technology.
— Mary Kubica, Pretty Baby
You can tell a lot about an area from its library, and I'd never discount the usefulness of town archives.
— Hester Young, The Gates of Evangeline
A library always housed a trove of undiscovered friendships and forays, and a bookstore, a place where those temporary connections might become a constancy, must always hold a charm over any scholar’s heart.
— Michelle Franklin